Keynote speakers
Jacek Witkoś
http://wa.amu.edu.pl/wa/Witkos_Jacek
Dative and accusative Experiencers and anaphoric binding
[handout]
This paper aims to account for peculiar binding properties of dative and accusative arguments in Polish, both plain objects and Object Experiencers (OEs). It has been observed that although Polish reflexive pronouns are (nominative) subject oriented, they can be bound by dative and accusative experiencers (Bondaruk and Szymanek 2007; Miechowicz-Mathiasen and Scheffler 2008, Witkoś 2007, 2008). At the same time, OEs, unlike nominative subjects, serve as antecedents for both reflexive and pronominal possessives. This mixed behaviour poses a puzzle for the traditional and novel formulations of Binding Theory (Chomsky 1981, 1986; Manzini and Wexler 1987; Rappaport 1986; Willim 1989; Reinders-Machowska 1991; Progovac 1992, 1993 and Reuland 2011), which assume complementarity between anaphors and pronominals in their local domains and plainly state that the subject is the privileged binder in Slavic. We base our analysis on the idea that morphologically deficient elements move to a functional category (v/T) to compensate for the missing structure (Béjar and Rezac 2003; Franks 2017, 2018) and an approach to binding proposed recently in Safir (2014) and Nikolaeva (2014), following Hestvik (1992) and Avrutin (1994). The latter proposal implements the concept of Index Raising (IR), where the undifferentiated anaphoric/pronominal element (henceforth the index) is (covertly) moved and adjoined to v or T. The distribution of the two spell-out forms of the index (either anaphoric or pronominal elements) is determined by two factors: the landing site of the index and the case position of its antecedent.
John Frederick Bailyn
https://www.stonybrook.edu/commcms/linguistics/people/_bios/_linguistics-faculty/john-bailyn.php
Russian Word Order and the Fate of Syntactic Theory
In this talk, I look at Russian word order patterns from the point of view of modern syntactic theory. I show that of the six basic patterns, only one seems to cause significant problems for syntactic theory, namely OVS, which has led to some considerably radical recent claims that cast doubt on our entire view of syntactic relations. I show that such a radical rethinking of syntax is neither necessary nor desirable to account for this one pattern, and that if we take seriously the puzzle it presents, we can narrow down the space of options for how to analyze the construction without abandoning what we know about other syntactic derivations in Russian and beyond.
Elizaveta Bylinina
Typology of numerals and the number line
The grammar of numerals can be sensitive to the quantity the numeral refers to: ordinal suppletion (‘first’ rather than ‘one-th', ‘second’ instead of ‘two-th') is restricted to low numbers (Veselinova 1998); it’s often the case (in Russian, for instance) that cardinals denoting ‘1’ and ‘2’ agree in gender, while the higher cardinals don’t; in many languages, the cardinal denoting ‘1’ is grammatically different from the rest of the cardinals — in Hebrew, the word for ‘1’ follows the noun while all other cardinals precede it (Borer 2005).
Some facts like these, reflecting grammatical splits on the number line, have been noted in linguistic literature, but a larger cross-linguistic picture is still missing. Where on the number line do these splits happen more often? Is ‘1 vs. the rest’ split more common than ‘1, 2, 3 vs. the rest’? Are there splits above 4? Are there interdependencies between splits (say, if a construction has no split after 1, it has no higher splits either)? These kinds of generalisations are relevant for theories of number cognition suggesting a fundamental cognitive split around 3-4. I will report findings of a typological study that aims to answer these questions.