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LSLT: Paulina Lyskawa (LING)

Time: 
Thursday, October 10, 2019 - 12:30 PM to 1:30 PM
Location: 
Language Science Center (2130 H.J. Patterson)

Lunch available at 12:15, talk begins promptly at 12:30.

Paulina Lyskawa (LING)

Phi-feature resolution under coordination - syntax or not?

Agreement on a predicate tends to be rigid and predictable: "I am/*is/*are", "you and me are/*am/*is". This behavior (and other properties of agreement) leads us to analyze it as a syntactic phenomenon. However, it has been observed that under some circumstances agreement starts to vary across speakers and scenarios (McCloskey 1991): "That the president will be reelected and that he will be impeached is/are equally likely." In this talk I will show the empirical range of variability in phi-feature resolution under coordination across languages (Germanic, Romance, Slavic and Bantu). I will discuss how much of this variability in phi-feature resolution under coordination we want to model in syntax and what the alternative modeling may look like.