Speaker: Pritha Chandra (IIT Delhi) Title: The syntax of politeness in Eastern Indo-Aryan Time/place: 4pm, Muntstraat 2A, room 1.11/MS Teams Abstract Recent years have seen considerable research around the representation of discourse-related constructs such as Speech Act Participants, politeness/honorificity etc in the syntactic tree (cf. Speas and Tenny 2003; Miyagawa 2012; Portner et al 2019;…

Speaker: Imke Driemel (University of York) Title: Anaphoric definites and where they put the index Date: 5 June 2025 Time: 16:00 – 17:00 Location: Janskerkhof 15A, room 1.03 / MS Teams Abstract Since Schwarz’ (2009) dissertation, cross-linguistic evidence from a number of languages has emerged that points towards a morpho-syntactic distinction between uniqueness based definites like ‘the moon’…

Phoevos Panagiotidis (University of Cyprus) Title: Beyond categorisers? DATE: 28 March Time: 4-5 pm Abstract Marantz (1996; 1997; et seq.) introduced a view of lexical categories according to which so-called lexical nouns, verbs, and adjectives result  from acategorial roots being categorised in grammar by categorising heads n, v, and a. Since then, research has only turned up modest…

Speaker: Gianluca Porta (Ulster University) Title: Extraction from adjuncts: the role of Small Clauses When: Tuesday 26 November, 4-5pm Abstract A well-known distinction between arguments and adjuncts is that only the former allow extraction. A number of reasons for the island status of adjuncts have been proposed (e.g. Haung’s (1982) CED). Recent experimental studies challenged…

Speaker: Tara Struik (University of Mannheim) Title: The results of contact: Tracing changes in resultativity encoding in the history of English in contact with French Place: Trans 10, room 0.19 / MS Teams Abstract:This talk will focus on the question to what extent the large influx of Old and Middle French verbs effected structural changes in the realisation of resultative…

Speaker:  Caterina Donati Title: Is there parsing evidence for Merge over Move? Two experiments on French and Hebrew (Joint work with Francesca Foppolo, Carlo Cecchetto, Lion Oks) Date: 24 October Place: Drift 23, room 0.13 / MS Teams Time: 4-5pm Abstract:  Much work stemming from the classical garden-path model of parsing has focused either on how…

Speaker: Zetao Xu (Chinese University of Hong Kong) Title: On reduced structures in Chinese: A labeling approach Date: 9 October Place: Trans 10 UU, MsTeams Abstract: There is a general debate concerning “reduced” clauses. Regarding the question-answer pair in (1), the sentential approach (Morgan 1973; Merchant 2004) would argue that the answer involves a full…