Syntactic variables and semantic minimality Ethan Poole (joint work with Zahra Mirrazi) We argue that when two syntactic variables are "related" and stand in a c-command relationship at LF, a ¾-pattern emerges: free/free, bound/bound, bound/free, and *free/bound. Several otherwise-disparate puzzles are shown to fall under this pattern: Dahl’s Puzzle, SCO effects, the Nested DP Constraint,...

Reimagining the Semantics of Narratives and Counterfactuals We propose a semantics for narratives and counterfactuals that explicitly connects them to cognitive models of temporal / causal inferences in narrative discourse comprehension. Both narrative discourses and counterfactuals are understood by (i) constructing temporally-indexed sequences of situation models, which are analog vector-space representations of meaning grounded in...

“Cross-linguistic differences in coarticulation in two Australian languages”

Under standard Phase Theory, the locality constraint deriving successive cyclicity is the PIC (Chomsky 2001), which requires movement to proceed via the edge of phases. For example, a CP phase can only be escaped via Spec,CP. The Williams Cycle (Williams 2003; Poole 2023) generalizes selective opacity, a different kind of locality: It is P's relative...

Structure building in language production Language production is one of the two primary ways in which we use our grammatical knowledge. However, compared to our understanding of how comprehenders parse sentences, how speakers build sentence structures for speaking remains poorly understood. In this talk, I make two main claims about the nature of structure building...