February 25, 2011: Junri Shimada, Christopher Tancredi

Time:: 3:00pm, February 25, 2011
Place:: Kwansei Gakuin University, Nishinomiya-Uegahara Campus,
Graduate Students Services Building 1 (No. 45), Room 205.
Talk 1
Speaker:: Junri Shimada (Nanzan University)
Title:: Unfold your way out of your head: Towards a new theory of head movement
Abstract:: The position of the verb varies from language to language, as well as in different types of sentences within a single language. In Chomskyan syntax, this phenomenon is accounted for by postulating movement of the verb as an instance of head movement. This talk discusses morphological, syntactic and semantic issues of verb movement and proposes a novel account. The aim is to derive the relation between morphology and syntax that Baker (1985) termed the Mirror Principle while providing for compositional semantics.
Talk 2
Speaker:: Christopher Tancredi (Keio University)
Titlte:: Negative Polarity Items and Questions
Abstract:: In this talk I will look at three theories of NPIs in questions and will argue that all three of them are empirically inadequate. The inadequacies fall into two different categories. On the one hand is a problem with the analysis of NPIs like any proposed by Kadmon and Landman (1993) and widely adopted in the literature. Any is claimed to widen the domain that it quantifies over, but in questions this leads to incorrect predictions. On the other hand are problems with the description of the environments in which NPIs are licensed in Questions. van Rooy (2003) argues that NPIs are licensed when they increase the entropy of a question. However, in-situ wh-questions are identical to their fronted counterparts in this regard and yet the former do not license NPIs when the latter do. Guerzoni and Sharvit (2007) argue that NPIs are licensed in strong exhaustive environments. However, contrary to their own claims, wonder need not introduce such an environment, and yet it can still license NPIs even in non-strongly exhaustive environments.

Semantics Research Group Meeting, February 25, 2011