SYNTAX & SEMANTICS CIRCLE
university of california, berkeley
Spring 2026
NEXT MEETING:
25 september
Rebecca Jarvis (Universität Potsdam)
An initial look at Atchan impersonal pronouns and reduced purpose clauses
This talk provides an initial description and analysis of an impersonal pronoun in Atchan (Kwa, Côte d’Ivoire) and related phenomena. The talk consists of two parts. In the first, I provide an initial description of the Atchan impersonal pronoun, showing that it behaves as a syntactically-present pronominal element. From there, I turn to a previously undescribed adnominal purpose clause, which I argue is structurally reduced. These clauses permit only a reduced range of subjects, with only the impersonal permitted as an in-situ subject inside the purpose clause. I explore consequences of this observation for views of nominal licensing.
UPCOMING MEETINGS:
2 october
Zachary O'Hagan (UC Berkeley)
Aspectual Iconicity, Polysemy, and Idiomaticity of Caquinte Ideophones
Documentation of stories and (learning) everyday conversation in Caquinte (Arawakan; Peru) since 2011 has revealed more than 300 ideophones -- some 10% of the documented lexicon and substantially larger than classes of adjectives and adverbs -- clearly distinguished by their particular phonotactics and highly expressive or 'dramaturgic' quality (e.g., shikererere 'calm on the outside, angry on the inside,' tsijerek 'lightning crack'). This presentation begins by describing the phonotactics, productive patterns of morphological derivation, syntactic distribution, and overall richness of Caquinte ideophones -- 'a step-child of modern linguistic science' (Voeltz and Kilian-Hatz 2001) -- in order to focus on important iconic aspectual distinctions among pairs and triplets of ideophones, polysemies, and ideophones as the primary home of idioms in the language. In addition to texts, data is drawn from video-recorded monolingual elicitation sessions that I show. While several properties of Caquinte ideophones are found elsewhere in the literature on ideophones (heavily skewed toward African languages), the large number of Caquinte ideophones and the specificity and frequent uniqueness of what they depict present challenges for lexicography. To that end I make some remarks on methodology and value in the context of language endangerment. I am especially interested in feedback from those working in particular subfields and frameworks as concerns relevances I may overlook.
9 october
Nels Practice Talk!
16 october
No meeting! Have fun at NELS!
23 october
Andrew Garrett and Erik Hans Maier (UC Berkeley)
30 october
Chase Boles (UC Berkeley)
6 november
Virginia Dawson (Western Washington University)
13 november
Yining Nie (San José State University)
20 november
Hannah Lippard (UCLA)
27 november
Thanksgiving! No meeting :-)
4 december
Kang Franco Liu (UC Berkeley)
PAST MEETINGS:
11 september
Amy Rose Deal and Kang Franco Liu (UC Berkeley)
Donkeys, bishops, and the distinction between weak and strong definites
Much recent work on definiteness has assumed that definite descriptions come in two types, weak and strong. Weak definites make use of a simple situation-relative uniqueness operator; strong definites add to this a variable available to dynamic binding. Drawing on evidence from Mandarin, Jenks (2018) influentially proposed that strong definites but not weak definites can serve as donkey anaphors. We show that this claim is incorrect for Mandarin as well as for German and English. Certain special cases of donkey anaphora nevertheless have diagnostic value for the distinction between weak and strong definites. We discuss two. First, in structures where there is no dynamic quantifier available to serve as an antecedent, strong definite descriptions cannot serve as donkey anaphors. Second, in so-called bishop sentences, the uniqueness requirement of the weak definite is not met; weak definite descriptions in these cases cannot serve as donkey anaphors. We apply these tests to definites in German, English, and Mandarin. Our results indicate that English the and Mandarin bare nouns are always weak definites, but also that important aspects of crosslinguistic variation with respect to weak definites remain to be explained.
4 september
Round Robin!