Below please find our colloquium schedule for the current (or most recent) term of the academic year. Please note that the current schedule is subject to revisions and frequent updates. If you are interested in other linguistics colloquia in the greater Vancouver area, please check the SFU colloquium schedule.

Unless otherwise noted, all of our colloquia take place on Fridays at 3:30 pm, with refreshments available from 3:15 onwards. The regular location is Room 103 of the Linguistics department building at Totem Field Studios ("TFS 103"), located at 2613 West Mall (see contact page for directions).

January - April 2013

(Click on title to view abstract of event, if available.)

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Friday, January 11, 2013
Ana Arregui (University of Ottawa, Department of Linguistics)
Title: The imperfect: from times to worlds in different languages
TFS 103, 1:00 pm
Note special time.

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Friday, January 18, 2013
Andrea Wilhelm (University of Victoria & University of Alberta)
Title: "Dënesųłiné as a type < e > language"

Abstract: This talk explores the semantic nature of nouns in the Athabaskan/Dene language Dënesųłiné, and its consequences for a typology of nouns. I present evidence for the hypothesis that in Dënesųłiné, nouns are inherently of type , entities, and enter the syntax as such. Key traits of the language fall out naturally from this hypothesis: the fact that nouns are bare (no determiners and number marking), the obligatoriness of copulas, the absence of intersective adjectives, and the fact that relative clauses are fully saturated (i.e., internally headed) clauses which are then nominalized. For a typology of nouns, my hypothesis means that it may not be universally true, as is widely assumed, that nouns enter the syntax as predicates (type <e,t>). Instead, there must be crosslinguistic variation in the semantic type of nouns, as suggested in Chierchia (1998), or perhaps the universal type of nouns is , as suggested in Baker (2003).

TFS 103, 3:30 pm

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Friday, March 22, 2013
Keir Moulton (Simon Fraser University, Department of Linguistics)
Title: Bound Cataphora: D-type pronouns, causatives, and amnestying WCO
(Click title for abstract.)

TFS 103, 3:30 pm

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Friday, April 5, 2013
Jozina Vander Klok (University of British Columbia, Department of Linguistics)
Title: Two types of auxiliaries in Paciran Javanese
Abstract: Cole et al. (2008) find that auxiliary fronting in yes-no questions partitions the set of auxiliaries in the dialect of Peranakan Javanese into two types: lower auxiliaries can front vs. higher auxiliaries cannot. In research on a different dialect of Javanese spoken in Paciran, I show that this partition holds for not only auxiliary fronting, but it is also found in two other syntactic constructions; namely, VP-topicalization and subject-auxiliary answers to yes-no questions. These findings suggest that the partition of auxiliaries is not unique to the distinct dialect of Peranakan Javanese, but a property that holds across all dialects of Javanese.

I offer a unified structural analysis in which the two types of auxiliaries are mediated by a phase edge. This projection, which dominates the set of low auxiliaries, serves as an intermediate landing site for A'-extraction for all three syntactic constructions given a ban on anti-locality movement (e.g., Abels 2003).

References:
Abels, Klaus. 2003. Successive Cyclicity, Anti-locality and Adposition Stranding., University of Conneticut PhD. Cole, Peter, Hara, Yurie, and Yap, Ngee Thai. 2008. Auxiliary Fronting in Peranakan Javanese. Linguistics 44:1-43.

TFS 103, 3:30 pm

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Friday, April 12, 2013
Eva Zimmermann and Jochen Trommer (University of Leipzig)
Title: Moraic suffixes, prefixes, and infixes
Abstract: Click here
TFS 103, 3:30 pm