Syntax/semantics reading group at NUS

The syntax/semantics reading group at NUS meets weekly during the semester. Each week we choose a paper to read and discuss, or someone will share their work in progress.

Announcements

Announcements are sent to the synsem mailing list. Subscribe to synsem on NUS Groups.

2021–2022 Sem 1

Our regular meeting time is Wednesdays at 2pm. Additional syn/sem events are also included, in bold.

Aug 11–13	SICOGG 23 online, with talks by Zheng, Zheng+Meghan, JR+Ryan
Aug 18	Cinque 2005 “Deriving Greenberg’s Universal 20 and its exceptions”
Aug 25	Chaiphet & Jenks to appear “Names as complex indices: On apparent Condition C violations in Thai”
Sep 1	Cournane 2014 “In Search of L1 Evidence for Diachronic Reanalysis: Mapping Modal Verbs”
Sep 8	Krifka 2000 “Alternatives for Aspectual Particles: Semantics of still and already”
Sep 15
Sep 22 10am	Language & Linguistics cluster talk: Kate Davidson
Sep 29
Oct 6
Oct 13
Oct 20
Oct 27
Nov 3
Nov 10

Archives

2020–2021 Sem 2

Jan 7–10	LSA 2021 online, with talks by Joey+mitcho, Kenyon+mitcho, Ryan+colleagues, Zheng
Jan 15–16	Asian Junior Linguists 5 online, with talks by Joey and Zheng
Jan 20, 2021, 4pm	Language & Linguistics cluster talk: Brian Rabern
Jan 27	JJ Lim, “A configurational account of case in Khalkha Mongolian”
Feb 3	Carlson et al 2006 “Weak definite noun phrases”
Feb 10	Huang to appear, “How Subjects and Possessors Can Obviate Phasehood”
Feb 17	Lee to appear, “Strength in deontic modals as acceptability and optimality”
Feb 24	No meeting (recess week)
Mar 3	Sabbagh 2016 “Specificity and objecthood in Tagalog”
Mar 10	Glass, “The negatively biased Mandarin belief verb yǐwéi”
Mar 17, 10am	Language & Linguistics cluster talk: Maria Polinsky
Mar 24	Belk, Neeleman, and Philip ms “What divides, and what unites, right-node raising”
Mar 31	No meeting
Apr 7	Ward, Sproat, and McKoon 1991 “A pragmatic analysis of so-called anaphoric islands”
Apr 14	Bruening and Al Khalaf 2019 “No argument–adjunct asymmetry in reconstruction for Binding Condition C”
Apr 21, 10am	Masha Polinsky, “Variation in exceptive constructions”

2020–2021 Sem 1

Aug 12–14	SICOGG 22 online, including talks by Kenyon, Zheng, Joey + mitcho, and distinguished alumni Jian Gang and Yosuke
Aug 17–20	SALT 30 online, including “poster” by mitcho + Meghan
Aug 20–22	AFLA 27, hosted by NUS but held online, including a talk by Kenyon
Sep 3	JJ on switch reference in Mongolian
Sep 10	Spathas & Michelioudakis to appear, “States in the decomposition of verbal predicates: evidence from additive operators”
Sep 17	Keely on plural marking in Burmese
Sep 24	Erschler to appear, “On timing of ellipsis: Evidence from extra deletion processes”
Oct 1	Dell 1983 “An aspectual distinction in Tagalog”
Oct 8	Pietraszko “The timing of agreement and A-movement in Ndebele”
Oct 15	Jasinskaja & Poschmann 2018 “Attachment in syntax and discourse: Towards an explanation for the flexible scope of non-restrictive relative clauses”
Oct 22	Kush, Lohndal, Sprouse 2019 “On the island sensitivity of topicalization in Norwegian: An experimental investigation”
Oct 29	Overfelt “Nipped in the bud: Failed sprouting in QUD not-at-issue content”
Nov 5	Florio & Nicolas “Plurals and mereology”
Nov 12	Henrison on Tagalog A’-dependencies

2019–2020 Sem 2

Jan 20	Jasbi 2016 “Three types of indefinites in Persian”
Jan 27	No meeting (CNY)
Jan 28 4pm	Nick Huang “‘Nounless’ nominal expressions in Mandarin Chinese: Implications for classifier semantics and nominal syntax”
Feb 3	Ngui Jiangang “Proposing to ignore updates in Colloquial Singaporean English” (joint work with Robert Henderson)
Feb 10	Sakamoto 2019 Overtly empty but covertly complex
Feb 17	Fenger 2019 Size matters: Auxiliary formation in the morpho-syntax and morpho-phonology
Feb 24	No meeting (recess week)
Mar 2	No meeting
Mar 9	Zheng “Agreement with exclusive disjunction in Slovenian and German”
Mar 16	Pancheva & Rudin 2019 “Speaker discourse roles and the discourse profile of reportative evidentials”
Mar 23	Andrew Murphy 2019 handout, “Left-Branch Extraction and Remnant Movement”
Mar 30	Nissenbaum 2000 “Investigations of covert phrasal movement”, chapter 2
Apr 6	Schlenker to appear “Inside Out: a Note on the Hierarchical Update of Nominal Modifiers”
Apr 13	Keely on Mandarin anti-pronominal positions

2019–2020 Sem 1

Aug 22	Lyn Tieu “Suppletion in children’s novel comparatives and superlatives”
Aug 29	Ippolito 2004 “An analysis of still”
Sep 5	Jouitteau 2007 “Listen to the sound of salience, Multichannel syntax of Q particles” (sixth floor meeting room)
Sep 12	Fitzpatrick 2002 “On minimalist approaches to the locality of movement” (sixth floor meeting room)
Sep 19	Jenks 2013 “Quantifier float, focus, and scope in Thai”
Sep 26	No meeting (recess week)
Oct 3	Kenyon + mitcho “Anti-pied-piping”
Oct 10	Postal 1994 “Contrasting extraction types”
Oct 17	No meeting
Oct 24	No meeting
Oct 31	Stockwell 2018 “Ellipsis in tautologous conditionals: the contrast condition on ellipsis”
Nov 7	Lee Junwen “Exploring the curious relationship between Colloquial Singapore English ‘Hor’ and ‘Ah’”
Nov 11, 4pm	Coppe van Urk “Interleaving hierarchies”
Nov 13, 4pm	Jordan Kodner “Language change as native learners’ response to ‘monolingual’ variation”

2018–2019 Sem 2

Jan 18 3pm	Ethan Jerzak “Paradoxical desires” (AS3 05-23)
Jan 23	Trinh 2009 “A constraint on copy deletion”
Jan 30	No meeting (staff meeting)
Feb 6	Chinese New Year: no meeting
Feb 8 3pm	Dan Hoek “Questions in action” (AS3 05-23)
Feb 13	Djärv & Bacovcin 2019 “Prosodic effects on factive presupposition projection”
Feb 20	Dan Brodkin “West Sulawesi clitic placement”
Feb 27	Recess week: no meeting
Mar 6	Jenks 2018 “Articulated definiteness without articles”
Mar 13	Lee Junwen “A look at what real(ly) is doing”
Mar 20	Ritter & Wiltschko 2016 “Humanness as an alternative to case licensing”
Mar 27	Huang et al 2018 “Learning attitude verb meanings in a morphosyntactically-poor language via syntactic bootstrapping”
Apr 3	Mary Dalrymple “Reciprocal relations”
Apr 10	Mary Dalrymple “Reciprocal relations continued”
Apr 17
May 3–4	Workshop: Recent Approaches to (Non-)Agentivity in Natural Language, organized by Tham Shiao Wei
Jun 6–7	Workshop: Approaches to Wh-Intervention, organized by Kenyon Branan and mitcho
Jul 13	Singapore Summer Meeting: A meeting of Austronesian fieldworkers

2018–2019 Sem 1

Aug 15	mitcho on relativization in Tibetan
Aug 22	(no meeting)
Aug 29	Cardinaletti & Starke 1999 “The typology of structural deficiency: A case study of the three classes of pronouns”
Sep 5	Heim 1983 “On the projection problem for presuppositions”
Sep 12	Merchant 2015 “On ineffable predicates: Bilingual Greek–English code-switching under ellipsis”
Sep 19	Huang 1988 “Wo pao de kuai and Chinese phrase structure”
Sep 26	Recess week: no meeting
Oct 3	Tham Shiao Wei “Agentivity and the encoding of caused events”
Oct 10	Constant 2014 “Contrastive topic: Meanings and realizations” chapters 1 and 2
Oct 17	Constant 2014 sections 3.1–3.2, 5
Oct 24	Constant 2014 chapter 6 on Mandarin ne
Oct 31 4pm	TC Chen “Case-Stacking in Amis” (reading room)
Nov 7 4pm	Kenyon Branan “Stress, Goals, and Word Order” (reading room)

2017–2018 Sem 2

Jan 17 4pm	Hadas Kotek “Multiple sluicing, scope, and superiority” (joint work with Matt Barros)
Jan 24	Gunlogson 2002 “Declarative questions”
Jan 31	Norris to appear “Unmarked case in Estonian nominals”
Feb 7	Biberauer, Holmberg, and Roberts 2014 “A syntactic universal and its consequences”
Feb 14	Aldridge 2017 “Extraction asymmetries in ergative and accusative languages”
Feb 21	Fox & Pesetsky 2005 “Cyclic linearization of syntactic structure”
Mar 1–2	Workshop on Current Issues in Comparative Syntax!
Mar 7	(no meeting)
Mar 14	von Fintel 1993 “Exceptive constructions”
Mar 21 4pm	Hideki Kishimoto “Revisiting ECM constructions in Japanese”
Mar 28	Soh 2018 “Mandarin Chinese sentence final de as a marker of private evidence”
Apr 4 4pm	E McCready “Honorification and Social Role”
Apr 11	Abels 2012 “The Italian left periphery: A view from locality “
Apr 18	Naga Selvanathan “The Malay meN prefix and A-movement”

2017–2018 Sem 1

Aug 24	Cole & Hermon 2005 “Subject And Non-subject Relativization in Indonesian”
Fri Aug 25 4pm	Helen Jeoung “Alternations in Indonesian C”
Aug 31	Rullmann 1994 “Negative islands aren’t islands”
Sep 7	Yosuke Sato “Particle stranding ellipsis in Japanese, string deletion, and argument ellipsis”
Wed Sep 13 4pm	Vera Hohaus “Negative Indefinites and the Degree Equative: A Solution to Penka (2011)’s Puzzle” (joint work with Malte Zimmermann)
Sep 14	Naga Selvanathan “Cleft constructions in Tamil and Anti-agreement”
Sep 21	Collins 2016 “Composition and definiteness without articles: A case study in Tagalog”
Sep 28	Recess week: no meeting
Oct 5	Aravind 2017 “Successive cyclicity in DPs: Evidence from Mongolian nominalized clauses”
Oct 12	Lassiter 2016 “Must, knowledge, and (in)directness”
Oct 19	Sauerland 2003 “Intermediate Adjunction with A-Movement”
Oct 26	Johnson 1991 “Object positions”
Mon Oct 30 11am	Trang Phan “A Nano-Syntax account of the Negation Constraint on the Perfect in Vietnamese”
Nov 2	Sauerland & Yatsushiro 2017 “Remind-me presuppositions and Speech-Act decomposition”