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.
Thursdays, 12:30-2:00 pm
225 Dwinelle Hall
spring 2008
fall 2007
spring 2007
fall 2006
spring 2006
fall 2005
Every week:
Syntax Group
4 october
Workshop on Affix Ordering
University of California, Berkeley
Department of Linguistics
PAST MEETINGS:
4 december
Line Mikkelsen will present a joint talk with Jorge Hankamer (University of California, Santa Cruz) on "The structure of definite complex nominals (in Danish)", and Maziar Toosarvandanin will present on "Contrastive 'but' involves gapping not in Farsi but in English".
27 november
No meeting, Thanksgiving Day.
20 november
Hannah Haynie will present on "Null Complement Anaphora: Why syntax matters", and Michael Ellsworth, Russell Lee-Goldman, and Russell Rhodes will give a talk on "Determination and modification: Interaction and interpretation".
13 november
Sandy Chung (University of California, Santa Cruz) will be talking on the Chamorro grammar and dictionary
project, and some issues that language endangerment raises
for language documentation. A description of the Chamorro
project is available here.
6 november
Hal Tily (Stanford University) will be presenting on "Modelling processing effects in diachronic data". There are three relevant, but very optional, readings:
- Kirby, S. 1999. Function, selection, and innateness: The emergence of language universals. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Hawkins, J.A. 2004. Efficiency and complexity in grammars. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Clark, B., M. Goldrick, and K. Konopka. 2008. Language change as a source of word order correlations. In R. Eckardt, G. Jäger, and T. Veenstra, eds. Variation, selection, development: Probing the evolutionary model of language change, 75-102. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
30 october
Amy Campbell will talk on "Separate marking of person and number in Hupa (and beyond)". Important notice: We will again be meeting in 118 Barrows.
23 october
Daniel Bruhn will talk on "Island
sensitivity in (H)mong wh-questions". Important notice: Because of renovations to our regular room, we will be meeting in 118 Barrows.
16 october
Tatiana Nikitina (Stanford University) will speak on non-local realization of oblique arguments in Mande languages.
9 october
Luis Vicente (University of California, Santa Cruz) will give a talk on "Syntactic isomorphism and non-isomorphism under ellipsis". The suggested background reading is Cilene Rodrigues, Andrew Nevins, and Luis Vicente's 2007 paper "Cleaving the interactions between sluicing and preposition stranding".
2 october
Ron Kuzar (University of Haifa) will present on "Predicate-initial sentence patterns in English and Hebrew from a typological perspective".
25 september
Rebecca Cover will be presenting on "The role of tense in an aspect language".
18 september
Lynn Nichols will give a talk entitled "Anaphora inside NPs".
11 september
Andrew Garrett will be giving a talk entitled "The origin of embedded relative clauses".
4 september
Alex Bratkievich, Russell Lee-Goldman, and Russell Rhodes will be discussing the structure of the verb phrase, in particular the motivation for and consequences of functional heads (e.g. v). There are three suggested readings:
- Larson, Richard. 1990. Double objects revisited: Reply to Jackendoff.
- Kratzer, Angelika. 1996. Severing the external argument from its verb. In J. Rooryk and L. Zaring, eds. Phrase structure and the lexicon, 109–137. [Soon to be available in Alex's box.]
- Folli, Raffaella, Heidi Harley and Simin Karimi. 2005. Determinants of event type in Persian complex predicates. Lingua 115:1365–1401.
28 august
Maziar Toosarvandani will present a joint talk with Annahita Farudi (University of Massachusetts, Amherst) entitled "Ergativity and the structure of complex predicates in Zoroastrian Dari".