Category: General, Graduate Students

SynSem 11/30 – Laura Kalin

Published: November 28, 2012

Laura Kalin will be speaking in Syntax & Semantics Seminar this Friday. Her talk is entitled: Two Last Resort Phenomena in Senaya (Neo-Aramaic). The abstract can be found below.

Speaker: Laura Kalin
Date/Time: Friday, November 30, 2-4pm
Location: Campbell 2122
Title: Two Last Resort Phenomena in Senaya (Neo-Aramaic)
Contact: Hilda Koopman

Abstract:

In this talk, I lay out novel data revealing two last resort phenomena in the Neo-Aramaic language Senaya, originally spoken in the city of Sanandaj in Iran. I show that theoretically accounting for the behavior of these last resort phenomena is not straight- forward, and that existing theories of last resort phenomena (in particular, Rezac (2011)) cannot fully account for Senaya. As an alternative to previous accounts, I present two possible ways to implement this last resort mechanism dynamically in the syntax, one involving selection, and the other involving the activation of a phi-probe.