LING Colloquium: Faruk Akkuş (UMass-Amherst)

"Friday September 6, our colloquium series kicks off with a visit from Faruk Akkuş, Assistant Professor of Linguistics at UMass Amherst, who will give a talk "On the (non)-relation between C and T," explored through data from several varieties of Arabic. The abstract follows. 

On the (non)-relation between C and T

This talk is an examination of the provenance of uninterpretable phi-features. In Minimalism, phase heads are defined as hosts of uninterpretable features that trigger syntactic operations (as developed in Chomsky 2001, 2008; Richards 2008), a logical consequence of which is that the only way non-phase heads get uninterpretable features is via their transfer from the phase heads. For example, phi-features associated with the inflectional system are not an inherent property of T; instead T is taken to inherit these features from the phase head C.

The study investigates the putative relation between C and T on the basis of three configurations from several Arabic varieties and challenges this relation: (i) C and T can agree with the same goal, but bear different values (cf. Haegeman and Van Koppen 2012), (ii)  C and T can agree with different goals -- they do not necessarily agree with the same goal, and (iii) embedded constructions with finite, agreeing T, but no higher projections such as Neg or C, suggesting that T's features are not coming from C, but are an inherent property of T.

These phenomena provide robust evidence that C and T are independent probes, endowed with a discrete set of phi-features. Moreover, this phi-feature-checking takes place in syntax, and not at PF via either string/linear adjacency (Miyagawa 2010), or prosodic phrasing (Ackema and Neeleman 2004)."