Veneeta Dayal will give a talk on “Puzzles from the Interrogative Left Periphery” at the Harvard Linguistics Circle on April 9, 2021. The talk presents several inter-related puzzles:
Sigríður Sæunn Sigurðardóttir published a paper entitled, “’Haf góðan dag’ Um uppkomu nýrrar kveðju út frá hugmyndum um talgjörðir” [‘Have a nice day’ The emergence of a new leave-taking term in Icelandic in the light of Speech Act Theory] in Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði 41.-42. The paper is on the leave-taking term Hafðu góðan dag (‘Have a nice day (ACC)’), which has become prominent in Modern Icelandic but has been prescriptively deemed “improper Icelandic” due to its being influenced by English Have
Milena Šereikaitė received the prestigious “Best paper in Language Award”, together with her co-authors Julie Anne Legate, Faruk Akkuş and Donald Ringe. Their article “On passives of passives” (Language 96:4, December 2020) furthers our understanding of the notion of voice and provides an account of the well-known but mysterious observation that verbs cannot be passivized twice.
Sigríður Sæunn Sigurðardóttir has published a paper on some work she has done here. The paper appears in a special issue of Nordlyd that features papers from the 34th Comparative Germanic Syntax Workshop (CGSW 34) that was held at the University of Konstanz in 2019.
Veneeta Dayal published a paper on “Yoruba bare nominals from a neo-Carlsonian perspective” in Urua et al (eds) African Languages in Time and Space, Zenith Books Ltd, Nigeria 2020.
On Thursday, July 23rd, Matt Tyler successfully defended his PhD dissertation. The defense, which was held virtually on Zoom, presented Matt’s dissertation entitled Argument Structure and Argument-Marking in Choctaw, supervised by Jim Wood. The committee members were Raffaella Zanuttini, Bob Frank, and Aaron Broadwell. Congratulations, Matt!
Last Friday Matt Tyler gave a colloquium talk at UMass Amherst entitled “Internal arguments disguised as external arguments: Lessons from an active alignment system”. Information about the talk, including an abstract, can be found on the UMass website: link to website.
Matthew Tyler and Jim Wood have published an article in the most recent issue of Linguistic Variation. The article is entitled “Microvariation in the ‘have yet to’ construction”, and reports on results from the research of the Yale Grammatical Diversity project. The ‘have yet to’ construction refers to sentences like ‘I have yet to visit my grandmother’, meaning ‘I have not visited my grandmother yet’.
