Output
2022
Sassy "I mean" and the conversational scoreboard. Talk at the 2022 annual meeting of the American Dialect Society, Washington, DC, January. [slides]
2021
Discourse and unaccusativity: Quantitative effects of a structural phenomenon. The syntax of argument structure: Empirical advancements and theoretical relevance, ed. Artemis Alexiadou & Elisabeth Sophia Maria Verhoeven. Linguistische Arbeiten/Linguistic Studies series. Berlin: de Gruyter. DOI: 9783110757255
2020
Semantic primitives at the syntax-lexicon interface, submitted 7/2020. Co-authored with Itamar Kastner. [LingBuzz]
Unaccusativity and theticity. Accepted for Thetics and categoricals, ed. Werner Abraham, Elisabeth Leiss, and Yasuhiro Fujinawa. Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, John Benjamins. [prepub pdf]
Type theoretic lexical semantics and the roots of verbs in syntax. Co-authored with Itamar Kastner. Poster presented at LSA 2020, New Orleans. [pdf of poster]
2019
Formalizing the syntax-lexical semantics interface: A type-theoretic approach. Co-authored with Itamar Kastner. Paper presented at OASIS2 in Nantes, France. [pdf of slides]
How do you smile along a path? Bodies and the semantic content of unergative roots. The Linguistic Review, 36(3): 343–363. Special Issue: Roots in Context. Guest editors: Noam Faust and Andrew Nevins. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/tlr-2019-2021
2018
Testing differences in discourse referent establishment from indefinite subjects: The case of intransitives. Paper presented at the workshop, "Preverbal indefinite subjects" held at the 51st annual meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE), held at Tallinn University, Estonia, August 29--Sept 1. [pdf of slides]
The Place of object positions in discourse. Invited talk at the inaugural Princeton Symposium on Syntactic Theory (PSST): Syntactic interfaces. Workshop held at Princeton, NJ, April 6-7. [handout]
Existential unaccusativity and new discourse referents. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics, 3(1), 24. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.283 [open access link]
Bodies, motion, and the semantic content of unergative roots. Paper presented at Unergative predicates: Architecture and variation, held Bilbao, Basque Country, on January 18-19, 2018. [handout]
2017
How do you smile along a path? Poster presented at Roots V, University College London (UCL) & Queen Mary University, London, June 17-18. [pdf of poster]
2016
English as a discourse ergative language. Between Existence and Location: Empirical, Formal and Typological Approaches to Existential Constructions, University of Tübingen, Germany, December 1–2. [pdf of slides]
Discourse and unaccusativity: Quantitative effects of a structural phenomenon. Presented at the 38th Annual Conference of the German Linguistic Society (DGfS 2016) as part of the workshop, "The syntax of argument structure: Empirical advancements and theoretical relevance", University of Konstanz, February 24-26. [pdf of slides]
Our asses, ourselves. Hornucopia: A workshop honoring Laurence R. Horn, Yale University, November 6-7.
2015
TOTALLY at the heart of "Drama SO". Invited lecture in Special Topics: Syntax and Dialects of English (Linguistics 397G), taught by Lisa Green, UMass Amherst, October 8.
[pdf is huge; email me for a link]
Expressive meaning in an AAE attributive construction. Language Sciences 50: 12-29. [pdf]
2014
How does a man become the man? Argument structure and existential propositions at the syntax-discourse interface. NYU Syntax Brown Bag. New York University, November 14. [handout]
Argument structure, referential anchoring, and specific indefinites. 2014. RED14--Indefinites in Discourse Structure. University of Cologne, June 27-28. [handout]
So [totally] speaker-oriented: An analysis of “Drama SO”. 2014. In Microsyntactic Variation in North American English. Edited by Raffaella Zanuttini and Laurence R. Horn. Oxford UP.
2013
Unaccusativity, direct objecthood, and information structure. 2013. Thursday Thoughts series. University of Pennsylvania, April 18. [handout]
2012
Unaccusativity at the Interfaces, Ph.D. thesis, NYU, 2012. Advisor: Alec Marantz; Committee: Chris Barker, Adam Buchwald, Julia Hirschberg, Richard Kayne. [lingbuzz]
Presentational unaccusativity: Argument structure and information status. 2012. Paper presented at the LSA special session, “Information Structure and Discourse: In memory of Ellen F. Prince.” LSA Annual Meeting. Portland, OR. Jan. 5-8. [handout]
2011
"Intransitive sentences, argument structure, and the syntax-prosody interface." 2011. Proceedings of the 28th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL), ed. Mary Byram Washburn et al., 275-28. [paper]
Unaccusativity, direct objecthood, and information structure. 2011. Paper presented at the Western Conference on Linguistics (WECOL), Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, BC, November 18–20. [handout]
"Totally high: Drama SO and the distribution of a speaker-oriented adverb. Syntax Colloquium Series, Yale University Linguistics Department. October 2011. [handout]
"The Prosodic Consequences of Unaccusativity." 2010. CUNY Psycholinguistics Supper. CUNY Graduate Center. [handout]. [This handout is a longer version of the WCCFL handout and has a bit more background on unaccusativity.]
Naomi Nagy and Patricia Irwin. 2011. What we heard and what we Hertz. An acoustic analysis of Boston r-dropping. Change and Variation in Canada (CVC) V, Victoria University, BC, May 14-15.
2010
"Intransitive sentences, argument structure, and the syntax-prosody interface." 2010. Paper presented at The 28th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL 28), February 19-21, 2010, University of Southern California. [handout]
Nagy, Naomi & Patricia Irwin. 2010. Boston (r): Neighbo(r)s nea(r) and fa(r). Language Variation and Change 22 (2): 241-278. [doi:10.1017/S0954394510000062] and [paper]
2009 and earlier
"Polarity and Degree in SO [totally] Constructions." 2009. Paper presented at the CUNY Syntax Supper. CUNY Graduate Center. [handout]
"SO [totally] positive." 2008. Paper presented at the 10th Annual SUNY-CUNY-NYU-YU Miniconference. CUNY Graduate Center, New York. [handout]
"Hijacked Predicate Raising in an AAE Attributive Construction." 2009. NYU Working Papers in Linguistics: Papers in Syntax. Volume 2, ed. by Irwin, Patricia and Violeta Vázquez-Rojas Maldonado. Spring 2009.
Patricia Irwin and Naomi Nagy. 2007. "Bostonians' /r/ speaking: A Quantitative look at (R) in Boston." Penn Working Papers in Linguistics 13.2: Selected papers from NWAV 35. [paper]
"Proper Names and the Structure of the English DP." 2007. Paper presented at the 9th Annual SUNY-CUNY-NYU Miniconference. New York University. [handout]
Patricia Irwin and Naomi Nagy. 2007. "The Return of R." NWAV 36 October 11-14, 2007. [handout]
Patricia Irwin and Naomi Nagy. 2006. Bostonians /r/ speaking. NWAV35 November 9-12, 2006.
"The Centralization of Low Back Vowels in a Small New Hampshire City." 2005. SECOL LXXII, April 7-9, 2005.