[lingtalks] Giuseppe Longobardi @ UCI Tuesday NOV 18

[Teresa A. Griffith]

The Department of Linguistics is proud to announce that Giuseppe
Longobardi will be speaking at UCI on Tuesday, November 18 at 3:30 pm, in
SSPB 5206.

Longobardi is Professor of General Linguistics at the University of 
Trieste, Italy. His research involves the syntax and semantics of nouns
and determiners, the theory of parametric linguistics and modularized
global parametrization, as well as the parametric comparison method and
the establishment of cognitive history.

The abstract for Longobardi's talk, "How universal is DP?" follows.

That all argument noun phrases, as opposed to at least some non-arguments,
require a dedicated position (often identified with the categorial label
D) has been suggested by Szabolcsi (1987) for Hungarian, Longobardi (1994,
2005) for Romance. The question whether this is a universal property has
remained more controversial: Germanic (at least English) has been claimed
to be subject to such a constraint in certain works (Stowell 1989, 1991),
but to lack it altogether in others (e.g. Chierchia 1998). The
presentation will try to address the universality issue in an empirically
careful but also principled fashion. It will be argued that both English
and  Scandinavian suggest the general presence of D in argument nominals,
modulo some secondary differences with Romance. Then it will be asked why
D should be necessary precisely with arguments. The answer suggested by
some of the phenomena analyzed will be that a specific conceptual
category, Person, is required in natural languages for denoting
individuals (but not properties). On these grounds the crucial prediction
will be made -and successfully tested- that in languages such as Japanese
where Person is not encoded in the grammar, but is only part of the
conceptual-intentional system, argument noun phrases will be able to
appear without a D category.

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Please pass on this information to anyone interested in attending.

We look forward to see you this coming Tuesday!


-- 
Teresa Griffith
UCI Linguistics Department
3151 Social Science Plaza
Irvine CA 92697-5100