SYNTAX & SEMANTICS CIRCLE

university of california, berkeley

Spring 2025

NEXT MEETING:

28 february
Melissa Cronin (Stanford)
On the Decomposition and Anteriority of Used to

Used to is a periphrastic form that is broadly characterized as a `past habitual.’ As a past habitual, used to intuitively contributes two semantic components: anteriority—which encodes a precedence relationship between two temporal intervals—and habituality, which, at a high level, makes reference to a plurality or iteration of events. From a morphological perspective, used to is opaque: it is inflectionally frozen and does not co-occur with overt TAM morphology. This raises the following question: what functional heads are responsible for encoding anteriority and habituality? I argue that anteriority does not come from past tense, by presenting data showing that used to does not give rise to Sequence of Tense (SOT) effects; used to consistently blocks the simultaneous reading, which is often taken to arise when the semantics of anteriority is obviated (Ogihara 1995, von Stechow & Grønn 2013, among others).

I follow Boneh & Doron (2013) in assuming that used to spells out two aspectual operators—Retro(spective) and Imp(erfective)—and that there is a locally c-commanding T, from which Retro inherits its perspective time. I diverge from Boneh & Doron in two ways. First, by adopting the semantics of the imperfective proposed in Deo (2009, 2015), as opposed to that assumed by Boneh & Doron, I ascribe the habituality of used to directly to Imp, without the need for an additional habitual operator. Secondly, unlike Boneh & Doron, who argue that T is fixed to be the time of utterance (TU), I argue that T is set to the local evaluation time (in the sense of Abusch, 1997). Support for this claim comes from the fact that, unlike any other past-referring habitual form (simple past, past progressive, habitual would), used to cannot co-occur with forward-shifting adverbials (e.g. #After John won the lottery, he used to go on vacation). I argue that, in these cases, the forward-shifting adverbial determines the value of T in a way that clashes with the semantics of Retro.

UPCOMING MEETINGS:

7 march
Ahmad Jabbar (Stanford)
TBA

14 march
Line Mikkelsen (UC Berkeley)
TBA

21 march
Masoud Jasbi (UC Davis)
TBA

28 march
No meeting. Happy spring break!

4 april
Jasper Jian (Stanford)
TBA

10 april
Hashmita Agarwal (UCLA)
TBA

11 april
Rickard Nilsson (UC Berkeley)
TBA

18 april
Katie Johnson (Stanford)
TBA

25 may
Andrew Simpson (USC)
TBA

2 may
Amy Rose Deal (UC Berkeley)
TBA

9 may
Shweta Akolkar (UC Berkeley)
TBA

PAST MEETINGS:

21 february
Margaret Asperheim (UC Berkeley)
Possessors and numerosity predicates in Nukuoro `have’-constructions

Possessor raising is a crosslinguistically widespread phenomenon in which a nominal functions semantically as a possessor but syntactically as a core argument (Deal 2017). In this talk, I present data from an in-progress project on possessor raising in Nukuoro, an underdescribed Polynesian outlier language spoken in the Federated States of Micronesia. Specifically, I will focus on `have’-constructions in Nukuoro, i.e. sentences that express meanings like I have (some/many/three) children (see e.g. Myler 2016). Both possessive and existential constructions in Nukuoro have sentence-initial numerosity predicates, e.g. E dahi naa daonga i dogu boo `There will be a party on my birthday’ (lit. `The party on my birthday will be one’). In possessive `have’-constructions, the possessor appears in genitive case as a modifier of the theme argument, and also optionally in unmarked case in sentence-initial position, e.g. (Au) e dahi agu ada o Emily `I have a picture of Emily’, lit. `I is/am one my picture of Emily’. I show that this optional sentence-initial possessor behaves more like a subject than a topic, prompting two questions: (1) what exactly is the status of the possessor in `have’-constructions, and (2) how can we represent the argument structure of numerosity predicates like dahi? Finally, I show that the same optional `raising to subject’ takes place when a numerosity predicate takes a theme argument modified by a genitive relative clause.

14 february
Zachary O'Hagan (UC Berkeley)
Relative Clauses, Interrogative Clauses, and Focus in Chamikuro

In this presentation, I provide the first description of relative clauses, interrogative clauses, and focus in Chamikuro—a highly endangered and one of the most severely underdocumented languages of Peruvian Amazonia—based on a recent collaboration with 99-year-old speaker Alfonso Patow Chota. The description is intended to be accessible to a general audience, and I am especially interested in feedback in terms of critical unanswered questions and what direction to take the analysis in formally.

Relative clauses show distinct marking for the relativization of intransitive subjects, transitive subjects, and objects; a special verb form also found under negation and in subordinate clauses; and, in transitive clauses, agreement patterns that are sensitive to the person of both the relativized and non-relativized arguments. Furthermore, 3/3 configurations exhibit the morphology of intransitive subject relativization in addition to a particular verbal suffix. Similar morphosyntactic patterns are found in interrogative clauses and the focus of arguments, which are also described. Notably, while it is possible to wh-extract an object directly, it is not possible to wh-extract an intransitive or transitive subject without their corresponding relative clause constructions. The description is situated in a broader description of basic VSO clause structure and agreement in the language, and is contrasted with the extraction of obliques, which exhibits different morphosyntax.

7 february
Carol Rose Little (University of Oklahoma)
Dependent case, first person plural and impersonal morphosyntax in Finnish

There is variation across languages as to whether the theme of an impersonal initiator is in dependent (accusative) case or unmarked (nominative) case. For example, in Lithuanian, themes of impersonal initiators appear with accusative case (Šereikaitė 2022). In Finnish, the focus of this presentation, themes of impersonals appear in unmarked nominative. What's interesting is this form can also be used in spoken Finnish to refer to first person plural, with an overt first person plural; both the subject and object appear in the unmarked nominative case. (This impersonal qua first person plural is similar to how the on impersonal can refer to first person plural in French.) In spoken and written Finnish case computation for other transitive constructions behaves as expected expected: nominative subjects, accusative objects. I build on previous work in Finnish such as Mailing (1993), Anttila & Kim (2017) and Poole (2022) to investigate the connection between case and impersonal morphosyntax.

31 january
No meeting.

24 january
No meeting. Happy new semester!