Two ling lunch talks on Nov. 6 2012 in Oak 338 from 12:00 to 13:30.

Gísli Harðarson will give a practice talk for WoSS9 titled “Layers, hierarchy and recursion in Icelandic compounds”.

“I argue for a more articulate structure for primary compounds to account for the distribution of stem and inflected modifiers in Icelandic compounds. Modifiers must match the domain they are merged in, i.e. stems are attached at the stem level and inflected modifiers are attached at a higher level, necessary for the realisation of inflectional morphology. Modifiers are subject to a semantic hierarchy, limiting the potential relations between a modifier and the head, based on the modifiers position relative to other modifiers. This hierarchy is repeated at each level of modification but does not hold between levels.”

Marko Hladnik from Utrecht University will present his work on “Resumption in Slavic relative clauses”.

“Starting with Slovene, we explore the patterns of relative clause (RC) resumption and argue that the common alternative ways of forming a RC we find in Slavic languages share one and the same syntactic derivation, with differences arising at PF due to recoverability considerations. Furthermore, the necessity to differentiate three types of resumption is demonstrated, and we argue that apparent optionality of resumption in Serbo-Croatian and Polish has deeper syntactic causes, and is conditioned by case morphology paradigms.”