$$Events$$

Feb. 18
12:30
- Feb. 20
14:30

Building 74, room 516

​​​​​Lecture I
February 18, 12:30-14:30
Phase theory and labelling

Lecture II
February 19, 14:30-16:30
Autonomous syntax: a case study of phi-features at the syntax-semantics interface

Lecture III
February 20, 12:30-14:30
Exploring the consequences: agree and agreement system revisited

If you plan to attend one, two, or all three talks (Talk III assumes Talk II), please contact Dr. Tova Rapoport:  tovarap@bgu.ac.il


Autonomous Syntax and the Syntax-Semantics Interface (“Distributed Semantics”)

With the rise of the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995 and following work), the focus of syntactic investigation has shifted toward features and their bundles. Yet, there are still many unanswered questions about feature representations and their bundling throughout the derivation. At the very core of our theorizing, we assume that a larger structure is represented by a label of its maximal projection or a phase (e.g., Chomsky 2013, Chomsky 2015) but we do not have a good theory of which features form a label and what happens if there is more than one feature of the same type present in the search domain of a label. Moreover, while substantial attention has been paid to features at the syntax-morphology interface, especially within the Distributed Morphology framework (e.g., Halle & Marantz 1993, Embick & Noyer 2007), we know very little about what happens to syntactic features at the syntax-semantics interface. 

This series of talks directly addresses the question of labeling by investigating narrow-syntax features at the syntax-semantics interface. The first presentation introduces a theory of phases and labelling and is aimed at students with no or little exposure to the current theorizing about the role of phases and labels in the derivation (e.g., Chomsky 2013, 2015; Bošković 2016; Kučerová 2018). 

The second presentation entertains the idea that narrow-syntax features are computed by the syntax-semantics interface in a manner parallel to the computations of overt syntax features at the syntax-morphology interface. Specifically, I argue that the syntax-semantics interface forms new feature bundles during spell-out. These interface bundles become part of the label of the spelled-out phase; their primary purpose is to make narrow-syntax features legible to the external interpretive module. The proposal is firmly rooted in the Y-model. The guiding idea is that only features present in narrow syntax can contribute to the formation of these interface bundles. Thus only syntax builds structures. The role of interfaces is to interpret these structures and make them legible for the purposes of externalization.

The third talk directly builds on the second talk and explores the consequences of the proposed model for the theory of agree and agreement. I argue that agreement as a morphological reflex of a structural relation between two syntactic objects, for instance, the structural subject and the predicate, can be based — even within a single language — on (a) a syntactic agree (“syntactic agreement”), (b) a morphological copying of late-inserted morphological material (“morphological agreement”), or (c) a morphological realization of feature bundles created at the syntax-semantics interface (“semantic agreement”). The distinction allows for a simpler and more predictive theory of agreement, e.g., with coordinations, including first-conjunct and last-conjunct agreement, and distinct properties of subject versus object agreement, including inverse agreement. At the same time, the proposal raises non-trivial questions about the validity of some empirical generalizations that use morphological reflexes of agreement to identify syntactic locality domains and the directionality of agree.