SCAMS 2020-2021 (Southern California Annual Meeting on Syntax) will be hosted virtually at the  University of Southern California, on Feb 6, 2021. 

The mission of SCAMS is to be "a fairly informal, low-stress meeting that will build camaraderie amongst Southern California syntacticians, while creating an accessible venue for syntacticians of all levels to present their research". We welcome any who would like to present their own research and/or be an audience member for the presentations of others.   

If you plan to attend (whether presenting or not) please fill out this form  which will help us plan. Those who intend to present should fill out the form by Saturday, January 9th, 2021, so that we can decide how best to accommodate those who have submitted. We will announce the full schedule after we have the presenters' information, but we more or less expect the event to run during the morning and afternoon (Los Angeles time).

Please contact scamsconference@gmail.com with any questions.  

• Zoom links will be sent out  to registered participants one week before the meeting.

9:00-9:15 Zoom Meeting Opens (Casual chatting time)

9:15-9:30 Opening Remarks, USC Syntax Students

9:30-11:00 Session 1: Movement and Constructions, Chair: Madhumanti Datta (USC)

• 9:30-10:00 Licensing VP movement and ellipsis in Mandarin and Cantonese, Tommy Tsz-Ming Lee (USC)

• 10:00-10:30 The ban on fronting English possessive pronouns and its consequences for their morphosyntactic structure, Colin P Davis (USC)

• 10:30-11:00 Mandarin passives revisited, Minqi Liu (UCLA)

11:00-11:30 Break

11:30-12:30 Session 2a: Featural Systems of The World’s Languages, Chair: Elango Kumaran (USC)

• 11:30-12:00 Person Sensitivity in Persian, Jennifer Medina (CSUF)

• 12:00-12:30 A configurational account of case in Mongolian, Jun Jie Lim (UCSD)

12:30-1:30 Lunch

1:30-2:30 Session 2b: Featural Systems of The World’s Languages, Chair: Elango Kumaran 

• 1:30-2:00 Rethinking the Mao Pronouns in light of new evidence: From Syntax to Morphology, Michael Ahland (CSULB)

• 2:00-2:30 Nobiin Tense, Aspect, and Modality Selections, Andriana Niederecker (CSULB)

2:30-3:00 Break

3:00-4:30 Session 3: Form and Interpretation, Chair: Bhamati Dash (USC)

• 3:00-3:30 Exceptional scopes in Mandarin relative clauses, Huilei Wang (UCLA)

• 3:30-4:00 Binding Demonstrative Phrases, Daniel Plesniak (USC)

• 4:00-4:30 Comparatives and the Syn-Sem Interface, Luis Miguel Toquero Pérez (USC)

4:30-4:45 Meeting to discuss SCAMS 2022 and Closing Remarks

4:45-5:30 Virtual “Happy Hour”  (BYOB, free chatting time)