about
The Circle is a weekly forum dedicated to discussion of the descriptive, experimental, and theoretical study of syntax and semantics, featuring presentations of ongoing research by members of the Berkeley Linguistics Department and other departments, as well as discussion of previously published works.
when
Fridays, 3:00-4:30pm
where
Room 1303 (Dwinelle)
Recurring link.
organizers
Shweta Akolkar
Kang 'Franco' Liu
University of California, Berkeley
Department of Linguistics
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Fall 2024
NEXT MEETING:
4 october
NELS practice talks
- Morphological boundary glottals in A'ingae: A new argument for [δ] (Maksymilian Dąbkowski)
- Person hierarchy effects from φ-agreement at the left periphery in Kawahíva (Wesley dos Santos)
- The clause-medial vP phase is real: Evidence from Moselle Franconian (Akil Ismael & Jessica Göbel)
UPCOMING MEETINGS:
11 october
Travis Major (USC)
TBD
18 october
No meeting. Have fun at NELS 55!
25 october
Huilei Wang (UCLA)
TBD
1 november
Lev Michael & Zachary O'Hagan (UC Berkeley)
TBD
8 november
Akil Ismael (UC Berkeley)
TBD
15 november
Kang Franco Liu (UC Berkeley)
TBD
22 november
Abby Roberts (UC Berkeley)
TBD
29 november
No meeting. Happy Thanksgiving!
6 december
Rebecca Jarvis (UC Berkeley)
TBD
PAST MEETINGS:
27 september
Maksymilian Dąbkowski (UC Berkeley)
Boundary glottals and A'ingae information structure: A morphological argument for a discourse feature hierarchy
I describe and analyze patterns of syntactically conditioned allomorphy observed in A'ingae (or Cofán, an endangered Amazonian isolate, ISO 639-3: con). Three information structural morphemes — the new topic -(ʔ)ta 'NEW', contrastive topic -(ʔ)ja 'CNTR', and exclusive focus -(ʔ)yi 'EXCL' — are realized as non-preglottalized (-ta, -ja, -yi) when attaching to most categories, such as DPs, CPs, or adverbs, but as preglottalized (-ʔta, -ʔja, -ʔyi) when attaching to TPs. I propose that the glottal stop (-ʔ) is a spell-out of T° conditioned by linear adjacency to a higher-order discourse feature [δ] (Bossi and Diercks, 2019; Mikkelsen, 2015) that dominates all the maximal information structural features. By documenting an overt realization of a vocabulary item conditioned by [δ], I provide novel morphological evidence for a hierarchical arrangement of discourse features (Bossi and Diercks, 2019; Mikkelsen, 2015), and of A'ingae feature geometry more broadly (e.g. Aravind, 2018; Baclawski, 2019; Baier, 2018).
20 september
Amy Rose Deal (UC Berkeley)
Case discrimination, Agree, and the theory of features
If case features are present in syntax, we expect syntactic operations to be able to reference them. Case discrimination is a cover term for ways in which reference of this type occurs. The recent literature on case discrimination calls attention to patterns of phi-agreement, movement, and intervention. In this talk I ask: how should we state syntactic operations (Agree) such that case features figure into them? What are case features themselves like - are they structured hierarchically? What is the status of case hierarchies in discrimination phenomena, and (how) can we derive them? In working to answer these questions I will draw out some conclusions for the interaction/satisfaction theory of Agree, along with what I see as a striking conflict between the best supported theories of case features and the case hierarchies posited in the phi-agree and movement literature.
13 september
No meeting. Go check out talks about the syntax-phonology interface at the Phonological Domains Workshop!
6 september
Round robin
Join us at Amy Rose's house to discuss any tricky data that you've come across recently!
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