Past Event! Note: this event has already taken place.
Speaker Series: Dr. Andrew Carnie (Syntax)
February 3, 2012 at 2:30 PM
| Location: | B149 Loeb Building |
| Cost: | Free |
| Audience: | null |
Dependency-Based Merge
Phonetics and Phonology
Dr. Andrew Carnie
Professor of Linguistics ; Faculty Director, Graduate College and Graduate Interdisciplinary Programs
(University of Arizona, Tucson)
A central assumption of modern Generative Grammar holds that rules and constraints hold over strings of words that form constituents. Following in the footsteps of Collins and Ura (2006) and several works by Timothy Osborne and his colleagues, I will present a theory of Merge where constituency takes a backseat and instead the operations of feature checking and feature valuation are all that are required in a Minimalist Syntax. Constituents are epiphenomena created by feature geometry. As evidences I will look at some word order facts that explicitly ignore constituent relations and instead seem to use phonetic and semantic criteria to determine order.
About the Speaker
Dr. Andrew Carnie is a professor of Linguistics at the University of Arizona Tucson. His research areas include the syntax, phonology and phonetics of Modern Scottish Gaelic, and various topics within the Minimalist Principles and Parameters approach to syntactic theory. He is the author of numerous books and articles, including Syntax: A Generative Introduction.