Constraint Based Linguistics in the South East of England
11 May 2004, King's College London
Place: Room 23D, Strand Building, King's College
The Strand campus is easily reachable by tube (nearest stops: Temple [District/Circle], Holborn [Piccadilly], Embankment [Northern/Bakerloo]). Here is a map:
http://www.streetmap.co.uk/streetmap.dll?P2M?P=WC2R2LS&Z=1
The arrow points to Somerset House, which is next to King's. King's is the area in green next to Somerset House.
Enter from the Strand, take the lift in the main foyer to the 4th floor (also called Level 9), turn right and follow notices to the Computer Science Department. 23D is at the end of the first corridor you will be walking along.
Contact the organizer, Mary Dalrymple (mary@dcs.kcl.ac.uk) for information.
10:30
Bob Borsley, University of Essex
Syntactic and lexical approaches to unbounded dependencies
Abstract: In `On wh-movement' (Chomsky 1977), Chomsky noted that a variety of constructions, including finite and non-finite wh-interrogatives, finite and non-finite relatives clauses, comparatives, topicalization sentences, clefts, easy-to-please sentences, and non-finite clauses associated with enough and too, share an important syntactic property. All involve what some call an unbounded dependency. That is, they contain a gap and some higher structure which can be seen as licensing it. In this paper, I want to compare what I will call a syntactic approach and what I will call a lexical approach. The syntactic approach that I will consider is that developed in some detail in recent HPSG (Sag 1997, Ginzburg and Sag 2000), and the lexical approach is that assumed but not really developed within Minimalism. I will argue that there is no reason to think that a lexical approach is simpler than a syntactic approach and that its reliance on phonologically empty heads may be a reason for scepticism about it.
11:15
Peter Peterson, University of Essex and University of Newcastle, Australia
Non-restrictive relatives and other non-syntagmatic relations in an LF
framework
12:00
Lunch
1:00
Irina Nikolaeva, King's College London
Modifier-head Person concord
1:45
Rodger Kibble, Goldsmiths College
OT or not? Some recent approaches to discourse anaphora
2:30
Coffee break
3:00
Maria Flouraki, University of Essex
Aspectual composition: a reinterpretation process
3:45
Sam Hellmuth, SOAS
Phonological phrasing in Cairene Arabic
Abstract: This paper proposes sources of evidence for phonological phrasing in the dialect of Arabic spoken in Cairo (Egypt), whose prosody above word-level remains largely uninvestigated, then goes on to demonstrate that Cairene Arabic (CA) prosodic structure, like that of certain Romance languages, is sensitive not only to syntactic complexity but also to prosodic weight. Within the theory of prosodic phonology, in which prosodic structure is mapped from yet independent of syntactic structure (Nespor & Vogel 1986; Selkirk 1986, 2000), different types of cues to phrasing have been proposed, including (non-)application of postlexical phonological rules, clash resolution strategies and tonal phenomena, both lexical and post-lexical. We present evidence for two cues to prosodic phrasing in CA: (non-) application of a rule of epenthesis (Watson 2002), and post-lexical tonal phenomena including pitch range reset, suppression of downstep, and phrase final boundary tones. The data come from a corpus of read sentences transcribed by the author using autosegmental-metrical notation (Ladd 1996). Reliability of the different cues, speech-rate effects and speaker-dependent variation are examined.