Junko and I would hereby like to declare the wh-reading group a success—and put it on hiatus, since the coming month or so is pretty complicated for both of us. We may try to do a couple of other meetings before the summer’s over, but we’ll stop with the regular Wednesday meetings at this point.
So, thanks, everyone, for participating!
The handout from today’s discussion of Guerzoni (2006) has been posted .
The discussion that Lisa Travis will lead on Malagasy and clefts will be this coming Monday, and will be at 11am. I will try (and probably succeed) to reserve 117 for the meeting.
One thing that might be useful to read in preparation in Paul Law’s recent NLLT paper (”The syntactic structure of the cleft construction in Malagasy”, 2007, NLLT 25:765–823).
If you are on campus, you should be able to go to the NLLT page, choose the November 2007 issue, and download the paper. (This is also linked in on the readings page.)
Next week is still on May 7th (the normal Wednesday time), but the following meeting will be a special Monday meeting, May 12th (at 11am), where Lisa will be discussing Malagasy and clefts with us.
We’ve got some plans, perhaps slightly tentative, for the future.
Next week (May 7th): Guerzoni (2006) “Intervention effects on NPIs and feature movement: Towards a unified account of intervention.” (Natural Language Semantics).
Then, May 14th, Lisa Travis is planning to present some of her current thoughts about Malagasy and clefts.
Still planning for 3pm meetings in 117.
Oops, the last entry said the plan would be made public shortly. The plan was made (and made public on the direct email list), and is either a) Junko is presenting to the reading group whatever she was going to present last week at the bag lunch, or b) the reading group is canceled, and, incidentally, Junko’s giving a bag lunch talk. Either way, Junko’s speaking at 3pm in 117. Twenty minutes from now as I type this.
Just so I get it posted, here’s today’s handout.
Again, we left the meeting today without a definite plan about next week, but the plan will be made and made public shortly.
So, I finally have the handout ready I think, and, after having gone through the Alonso-Ovalle & Menéndez-Benito (2007) paper, I don’t have a lot to say about what you can skip, if you’re pressed for time. It all kind of fits into the flow.
There are a couple of appendices, which are pretty skippable, and that brings it down to a 44 page paper, which isn’t bad. It’s also pretty quick and easy to read, they’re mainly doing a couple of experiments to test a mashup of Kratzer & Shimoyama (2002), Alonso-Ovalle (2006), Alonso-Ovalle & Menéndez-Benito (2003), and Schwarzschild (2002).
Anyway, I promised notes, though I’m not sure these notes count for much.
I’ve posted the handout from the last meeting, with a couple of minor corrections (The corrections are just adding a star that was missing on one of the readings of one of the examples, and adding a footnote about the place of a couple of the examples concerning bare wh-indefinites in the Yanovich’s argument).
At the last meeting, we decided that, at least for the moment, we would continue to meet on Wednesday, but a little bit earlier (3pm rather than 3:30pm) now that classes have ended. So:
Next meeting: Wednesday, April 23, 3:00pm in room 117.
We also hadn’t really come to much of a conclusion about what to look at. After looking at a couple of options, I think that what I’d like to try to look at is the paper called “Another look at indefinites in islands” by Luis Alonso-Ovalle and Paula Menéndez-Benito, recently posted to semanticsarchive.net.
The paper is a little bit long, but continues along with some of the themes of things we’ve looked at recently. Like last week’s paper (Yanovich 2005), it deals with questions about indefinites and representing them as “Hamblin-indefinites” (that is, along the lines of Kratzer & Shimoyama 2002), and it also comes back to the questions about Spanish indefinites that we are somewhat familiar with from Martí’s paper a few weeks ago.
If I manage to get to the preparation a little bit earlier this week, I’ll try to post something here about what sections I think are most important to look at to get the point, if you don’t have time to read the whole thing (it’s not really that long, but it’s 57 pages). If it winds up being Tuesday night and you’d like to come, having at least looked at the paper a bit, check back here to see if I’ve provided anything helpful.