On Friday April 22nd 2022 at 2:00pm EST there will be another Colloquium. Guest Speaker Ahmad Alqassas from Georgetown University will be presenting "Demystifying Puzzles in Polarity Sensitive and Coordinate Complexes: Covert Syntactic Licensing as Last Resort".
Zoom links have been shared via email from the Colloquium Committee.
Hope you can all attend!
Demystifying Puzzles in Polarity Sensitivity and Coordinate Complexes:
Covert Syntactic Licensing as Last Resort
Coordinate complexes display a variety of empirical puzzles that challenge our standard assumptions about the nature of syntactic categories, operations and structural configurations available in syntax. The theoretical debates diverge on whether coordinate complexes have a special syntactic status necessitating the addition of syntactic categories, operations or configurations. Another debatable issue is whether the clause structure of coordinated DPs involves phrasal or clausal coordination at LF (the Logical Form). This talk focuses on empirical puzzles in Arabic involving the structure of coordinate complexes and their interaction with negation, agreement, and ellipsis. A close look at the syntax of Arabic coordinate complexes reveals that, unlike their English counterparts, coordinators such as wala ‘nor’ are the lexicalization of a syntactic head that takes the internal conjunct as a complement and the external one as a specifier. We shall see that in negatively disjoined DPs [laa DP…wala DP], the coordinators are Negative Concord Items (NCIs) licensed through syntactic agreement with either overt operators or a last resort covert operator. These coordinators are conspicuous analogues of the person-NCI wala-NP ‘no body’ in their ability to co-occur with negative adverbs in the CP layers without triggering a double negation reading. I then show that Closest Conjunct Agreement (CCA) in negatively disjoined DPs involves clausal coordination and ellipsis.
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