George Tsoulas from University of York gave a ling lunch talk titled “The grammar of silent TIME”.

This talk begins with the simple observation that temporal clauses introduced by  BEFORE resist the presence of true negation.  Taking my cue from this type of fact I look more closely at BEFORE and present an analysis following Kayne’s proposal that there are contentfully empty nouns such as AMOUNT/NUMBER and empty demonstratives like THIS/THAT.  The proposal in a nutshell is that BEFORE is always a preposition that takes a silent DP complement akin to [THIS/THAT TIME/OCCASION] with the clause attached to it as a relative modifier. I use this structure to derive the facts about negation in terms of presupposition failure.  In the final and more speculative part of the talk I try to extend this approach to expletive negation.

Beata Moskal gave a ling lunch talk titled “A Case Study in Nominal Suppletion”