Hello again, BULA -- it turns out that the information that went out yesterday is already slightly out of date.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!