Hello again, BULA -- it turns out that the information that went out yesterday is already slightly out of date. One of the candidates who was going to be visiting is no longer coming. The revised schedule is below:
--
HI,
Very sorry to inform you that the events announced just last night
for Laura McPherson have been cancelled.
Revised schedule for presentations by Morphology candidates
1. Neil Myler, PhD Candidate, NYU
https://sites.google.com/site/neilmylerlinguist/
Monday, February 3, 5:15-6:45 PM, KCB 101.
"Crack words, and you crack grammar: what morphology
has to teach us about the language faculty"
In this talk, I will use data from English, Quechua, and
other languages to argue that morphology is not an
independent component of the grammar. Instead,
the phenomena we call ‘morphology’ emerge partly
from syntax, partly from phonology, and partly from
the interaction between these two. Far from belittling
the importance of morphology as a subfield, I will show
that this viewpoint places the study of morphology
in a privileged position. Since the phenomena of
morphology emerge from the interaction of different
subcomponents of grammar, it follows that morphology
has more to teach us about how these subcomponents
fit together than any other subfield.
2. Laura McPherson, PhD Candidate, UCLA - CANCELLED
Thursday, February 6, 5:15-6:45 PM, in KCB 101.
3. Mark Norris, PhD Candidate, UC Santa Cruz
http://people.ucsc.edu/~mnorris/
Monday, February 10, 5:15-6:45 PM, in KCB 101.
"Refining the characterization of nominal concord:
Evidence from Estonian"
This talk is an investigation of what I will call nominal
concord -- the kind of agreement seen between nouns and the
elements that modify them (e.g., adjectives, demonstratives).
Descriptively, nominal concord is often described as various
elements "agreeing with the head noun." Theoretically, it has
been proposed that nominal concord is in some sense the noun
phrase correlate of subject-verb agreement (Baker 2008,
Carstens 2000, among others). In this talk, I investigate the
behavior of nominal concord in Estonian, ultimately arguing
that both views need to be revised. I will propose that apparent
"agreement with the head noun" is epiphenomenal and that
there are a number of important differences between concord
and subject-verb agreement that need to be taken seriously.
Instead, I will propose that nominal concord is purely
morphological: elements showing concord in Estonian must
express case and number for morphological reasons, and they
acquire those values from the closest (nominal) phrase that
contains them.
Likewise, the meeting for her with students planned for
Feb. 7 will not take place.
Sorry!