Jason Merchant Colloquium
Jason Merchant
University of Chicago
Explorations of the dark side of ellipsis
Friday, Apri 4, 3:30 pm, Machmer W-26
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Other Ling Newsletters
06:11 (2008-04-03)
April 3, 2008
Syntax Guru: Jason Merchant
From Kyle Johnson, Guru of Gurus:
This year's syntax guru arrived Tuesday, April 1, and will stay with us until April 15.
He is Jason Merchant, associate professor of linguistics at the University of Chicago. Jason is known best, perhaps, for his work on Sluicing — a construction that he literally wrote the book on. That book, published in 2001, focuses on the island relieving property of Sluicing, and outlines an ambitious project that tracks this property back to slight mismatches which arise between sluices and their antecedents. It inspired a slew of papers and dissertations on islands, sluicing and ellipsis. He followed up this book with cross-linguistic work on Sluicing, including two influential papers on sluicing in Greek, and research on "fragment answers," which he shows to have a syntax and semantics related to Sluices. In a paper that has circulated for some time, he also uses Sluicing to reveal an effect that he explains with an OT-style violable constraint on ellipsis (MAX ELIDE) that has generated considerable interest in the ellipsis community.
Unsurprisingly, he has worked on other forms of ellipsis as well. His important paper with Chris Kennedy on attributive comparative deletion (published in NLLT in 2000) kicked off another line of papers and dissertations, and continues to influence work on this construction. His pair of papers on Antecedent Condition Deletion in the journals Syntax and Linguistic Inquiry zero in on an intriguing problem for the standard accounts of this construction. And in the last year or two, he has been investigating why certain forms of ellipsis (VPE, for instance) allow mismatches between the voice of the elided phrase and the voice of its antecedent, while other forms of ellipsis (Pseudogapping, Gapping and Sluicing) don't.
You can learn more about his work, his interests, and his face, from his webpage.
As those of you familiar with his publications will know, Jason's polyglotism enriches his work with a useful comparative dimension. He has a surprisingly complete grasp of how islands and ellipses vary cross-linguistically. He also has a surprisingly complete grip on the syntax canon. He is among the best read syntacticians I know. He will be hanging out in Barbara's office, on the third floor. His time with us is short; be sure to use him early and often.
[Thanks Kyle!]
Syntax Reading Group Today
The other SRG meets today (April 3), at Annahita, Chris, and Karen's place in Northampton, starting at 8:00 pm. The group will read an article in preparation for Jason Merchant's colloquium, namely, 'Voice and ellipsis'.
[Thanks Annahita!]
Tanja Heizmann is presenting at the interdisciplinary conference ISES 5 in Mainz, Germany, April 3-5. Her talk is called 'Die Entwicklung von Exhaustivität in Spaltkonstruktionen, Fragen und Quantifikatoren in Deutschen und Englischen Kindern'.
Tom Ernst at OSU
Tom Ernst is giving at invited talk at NAACL 20 (North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics) at The Ohio State University on April 25. The talk is called 'Adverbs and Positive Polarity in Mandarin'. Tom writes, "This meeting is a celebration of the conference's 20th anniversary; I was involved in getting it established 20 years ago and have served as NACCL's coordinator until this year." Very cool!
Magda Oiry: Successful Dissertation Defense
Magda Oiry (UMass Amherst Linguistics visitor) defended her dissertation on the acquisition of long-distance movement in French at Nantes, March 17, with Bernadette Plunkett and Tom Roeper on the committee.
[Thanks Tom!]
Tom Roeper in Lyon
Tom Roeper gave a talk called 'Implicatures and Maximizing Falsifiability' at the Institute for Cognitive Science, in Lyon, March 18.
Angela Carpenter's Dissertation now Available
Angela Carpenter's dissertation Learning Artificial Languages: The Role of Universal Grammar is now available on Amazon.
[Thanks Kathy!]
Proceeding of SULA 2 Now Freely Available
Jan Anderssen has made the out-of-print SULA 2 volume (originally a GLSA title) available freely online. Thanks, Jan, for this wonderful service to the community.
[Thanks Amy Rose!]