Selected talks and handouts
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Structural conditions on the pronunciation of movement chains.
Colloquium, Department of Linguistics.
University of Connecticut. March 2019.
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A unified approach to the syntactic movement of heads and phrases.
Morphology and Syntax Workshop.
University of Chicago. February 2018.
[ abstract ]The question of whether syntactic movement is independent of the nature of the moved element has been central to efforts to resolve the tension between descriptive and explanatory adequacy (Chomsky 1995). It has seemed necessary, for example, to distinguish between movement of phrases (i.e. maximal projections), modeled in terms of Internal Merge, from movement of heads (i.e. strictly minimal projections), modeled by other means. In this talk, I suggest that there is no need to distinguish between phrasal and head movement, and that Internal Merge (like External Merge) applies in the same way to both phases and heads.
The empirical motivation for this proposal comes from the apparent existence of head movements that exhibit the characteristic properties of phrasal movement. I discuss in detail one such head movement: participle fronting in Bulgarian (an instance of "Long Head Movement"). Like phrasal movement, participle fronting in Bulgarian targets the root, violates the Head Movement Constraint, can cross finite clause boundaries, and can have interpretive consequences. I develop an understanding of participle fronting as an instance of Internal Merge of a head into a specifier position (e.g. Toyoshima 2001, Matushansky 2006, Vicente 2007).
Head movement into a specifier position requires the Chain Uniformity Condition to be abandoned (in its strongest form). I suggest that this, along with the abandoning of the closely related stipulation that the target of movement always projects, has welcome consequences. It correctly predicts the existence of (i) projecting movement of a phrase (where a moving phrase projects post-movement) and (ii) reprojecting movement of a head (where a moving head reprojects post-movement). I take certain kinds of relativization to be instances of (i) (e.g. Bhatt 1999, Izvorski 2000) and certain V and N movements to be instances of (ii) (Fanselow 2003, Georgi and Müller 2010).
Finally, to accommodate in this theoretical context head movements that do not behave like phrasal movement, I draw on Harizanov and Gribanova's (2018) conclusion that such movements are the result of (post-syntactic) mechanisms distinct from Internal Merge.
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Resumption and Chain Reduction in Danish VP Left Dislocation. With Line Mikkelsen.
48th Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society (NELS 48).
University of Iceland, Reykjavík, Iceland. October 2017.
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On the nature of syntactic head movement.
Colloquium, Department of Linguistics.
McGill University. February 2017.
[ abstract ]In Harizanov and Gribanova 2017, we argue that head movement phenomena having to do with word formation (affixation, compounding, etc.) must be empirically distinguished from head movement phenomena having to do purely with the displacement of heads or fully formed words (verb initiality, verb-second, etc.). We suggest that the former, word-formation type should be implemented as post-syntactic amalgamation, while the latter, displacement-type should be implemented as regular syntactic movement.
In this talk, I take this result as a starting point for an investigation of the latter, syntactic type of head movement. I show in some detail that such movement has the properties of (Internal) Merge and that it always targets the root. In addition, I suggest that, once a head is merged with the root, there are two available options (traditionally assumed to be incompatible with one another or with other grammatical principles): either (i) the target of movement projects or (ii) the moved head projects. The former scenario yields head movement to a specifier position, while the latter yields head reprojection. I offer participle fronting in Bulgarian as a case study of head movement to a specifier position and show how this analysis explains the apparently dual X- and XP-movement properties of participle fronting in Bulgarian, without stipulating a structure-preservation constraint on movement. As a case study of head reprojection, I discuss free relativization in Bulgarian. A treatment of this phenomenon in terms of reprojection allows for an understanding of why an element that has the distribution of a relative complementizer C in Bulgarian free relatives looks like a determiner D morphologically.
This work brings together and reconciles two strands of research, usually viewed, at least to some degree, as incompatible: head movement to specifier position and head movement as reprojection. Such synthesis is afforded, in large part, by the exclusion of the word-formation type of head movement phenomena from the purview of syntactic head movement, as in Harizanov and Gribanova 2017.
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Post-syntactic head movement in Russian predicate fronting. With Vera Gribanova.
91st Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA 91).
Austin, TX. January 2017.
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Whither head movement? With Vera Gribanova.
Workshop on the Status of Head Movement in Linguistic Theory.
Stanford University. September 2016.
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Agree-dependent A-movement and low copy pronunciation in Russian. With Bonnie Krejci and Vera Gribanova.
Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics 25.
Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. May 2016.
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Head movement to specifier positions in Bulgarian participle fronting.
90th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA 90).
Washington, DC. January 2016.
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Prosodic smothering in Macedonian and Kaqchikel. With Ryan Bennett and Robert Henderson.
51st Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society (CLS 51).
University of Chicago. April 2015.
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Denominal adjectives in Bulgarian and the syntax-morphophonology interface.
Syntax & Semantics Circle.
UC Berkeley. September, 2014.
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