registration is free but required: click here

information here

general introduction/opening session chair: Gennaro Chierchia
2.30–3.10	Highlights from the Hitchhiker's Guide to Bare Nominals [slides]	Veneeta Dayal
3.10–3.30	Bardi: Deducing (in)definiteness from archival materials Five issues for interpreting the Hitchhiker's questionnaire [handout | slides]	Claire Bowern
session 1 chair: Manfred Krifka
3.30–3.50	Split-scope definites in Russian In this talk, I focus on split-scope definites in Russian (the rabbit in the hat in a context with a plurality of rabbits and hats but only one rabbit-hat pair), a construction that has not so far been studied. It presents fresh evidence for the importance of uniqueness in the semantics of Russian bare singulars. As background, Soloveva, Polinsky and Dayal (to appear) find that: (i) Russian bare singulars are kind terms and are acceptable in generic statements, (ii) Russian bare singulars display the uniqueness and anaphoric potential typical of definites, (iii) Russian bare singulars can introduce new entities and are in that respect like indefinites, but they cannot take existential wide scope over other operators nor can they have partitive specific readings and are unlike indefinites in that respect. These conclusions are based on the (In)definiteness Questionnaire of Dayal (to appear). While the inability of Russian bare singulars to take wide scope has been confirmed by Geist (2010), the reliance on uniqueness claimed in Dayal (2004) has been questioned by several authors, most recently in an experimental study by Simik and Demian (2020). In this talk I focus on expanding the empirical landscape in which we observe that Russian bare singulars have a uniqueness requirement by considering this new type of construction. [slides]	Anita Soloveva
3.50–4.10	Is the Cuzco Quechua plural marker kuna optional? Previous work on Cuzco Quechua has claimed that the suffix -kuna is an optional plural marker (Faller 2007). We present evidence against this. By looking at inanimate and animate nouns, in subject and in object position we find that nouns marked with -kuna denote more than a simple plurality of individuals. They may refer to a group with different types of objects in it, or multiple groups of different types, or a combination of the two. We suggest that -kuna represents a sorting mechanism for items within a group. We base this on the interpretive possibilities available to inanimate nouns with -kuna, where the picture is relatively clear. We present the facts for animate nouns, showing that the claim for optionality does not hold (it is needed at times for plural reference). How the sorting mechanism applies in the animate domain is work in progress. [slides]	Liliana Sánchez & Janett Vengoa
4.10–4.30	The mass/count distinction in classifier languages: insights from ERPs on processing Korean number morphologyWhile it has been argued that generalized classifier languages such as Korean and Chinese lack the syntactic count/mass distinction in their grammars (Chierchia, 1998, Krifka, 1995), others have claimed that the syntactic count/mass distinction is needed to account for the distribution count versus mass classifiers in Chinese (Cheng & Sybesma, 1998, 1999). In the present study we investigated the question of whether Korean is also constrained by the count/mass distinction in its classifier system (Experiment 1). In Experiment2, we investigated the optional marking of plurality through the morpheme TUL, which we expect to be possible with count but not mass nouns if there is a syntactic count/mass distinction in Korean. In Experiment 1, the collocation of mismatching classifiers (count noun + classifier for substances; mass noun + classifier for objects) elicited both N400 and P600, which implies that classifier mismatches are syntactically processed and not just semantically. In Experiment 2, we examined ERPs responses to TUL-attached to nouns denoting objects and substances. If TUL-marking is constrained by the syntactic count/mass distinction, we expect the former to be well-formed, and the latter to be unacceptable. In our results, however, we found that adding plural marker TUL elicited an N400 regardless of whether it was attached to object-denoting or substance-denoting nouns. This implies that speakers of Korean take the combination of noun and the plural marker TUL to be marked, preferring to use a bare noun in the relevant contexts. However, we found a significant interaction between classifier type and the plural marker TUL. Even though the difference was not significant, in the count category, the combination of noun and the plural marker TUL elicited P600 to a higher degree compared to bare nouns, while in the mass category, the bare form elicited P600 more than the combination of noun and the plural marker TUL. These results suggest that the plural marker TUL might not be processed syntactically by native Koreans. We take these results to imply that the syntactic count/mass distinction exists in Korean, unlike Kanero et al (2015) who did not find evidence for it in the syntactic processing of classifiers in Japanese. The distinction manifests itself in the classifier system, which is a robust part of Korean grammar. As for why -TUL-marking is not fully constrained by the count/mass distinction, our answer is that it is not a fully grammaticized marker of plurality. We suspect that as more speakers use TUL as a grammaticized marker of plurality, its use may increasingly be constrained by the count/mass distinction.	Sea-hee Choi & James Yoon
4.30–4.45	Break
poster session celebrating 25 years of ‘Reference to Kinds across Languages’   & 40 years of inspiring ideas from its author
4.45–5.50	posters Comfort Ahenkorah, Ushasi Banerjee, Daria Bikina, Indira Das, Janek Guerrini, Jeremy Johns, Fereshteh Modarresi & Manfred Krifka, Augustina Owusu, Yagmur Sag, Ankana Saha, Sadhwi Srinivas. full list
5.50–6	short break
session 2 chair: Florian Schwarz
6.00–6.20	Definiteness and Genericity in Cabo Verdean Creole and Mandinka Creole languages typically emerge in multilingual settings among language users endowed with distinct first languages. As a result of the intense and oftentimes long-term contact between users, the languages in contact leave long-lasting imprints on the emerging Creole language. The traces of the founding populations (the Founder Principle, Mufwene, 1996) can be observed at the lexical, phonological, morphosyntactic and semantic levels of the Creole language, next to internal developments and genuine innovations that make the Creole language a distinct linguistic system that stands independently from its source languages. The objective of this presentation is to compare Cabo Verdean Creole both to its Portuguese lexifier and to one of its main substrates, Mandinka (Quint, 2006), to evaluate whether traces of these source languages are observable in Cabo Verdean, specifically with respect to its use of demonstrative and definite determiners. We show that with respect to number morphology on demonstrative phrases, the behavior of the Cabo Verdean demonstrative can align either with Portuguese or with Mandinka, leading to the variation documented in Baptista and Dayal (to appear). These results support the Founder Principle. In contrast, when one examines reference to kinds/genericity, the behavior of Cabo Verdean is distinct from both Portuguese and Mandinka which require definiteness marking on both singular and plural nouns. Cabo Verdean only uses bare nouns. This does not support the Founder Principle, showing instead that Cabo Verdean has undergone internal development in that aspect of its grammar. [slides]	Marlyse Baptista & Ousmane Cisse
6.20–6.40	Expressing (in)definiteness across Austronesian Beginning in the Philippines, I offer a critical view of recent analyses that discount the referential properties of Tagalog case markers and argue that the referential properties of case markers make a key contribution to the interpretation of arguments in Tagalog and more widely in the Philippine zone. I then examine languages south of the Philippines that have lost case-marking determiners and propose a typology of strategies that compensate for this loss. I show that syntactically conservative languages maintain the general mapping of definite undergoers to the nominative/absolutive argument with and without reinforcement by semantically bleached determiners and relative markers. I also discuss a rarer pattern by which a third singular genitive becomes a general marker of possession and then a marker of identifiability via “associative anaphora”. Finally, I turn eastwards to discuss head-marking strategies, as found in Muna, where a historically distributive/pluractional verbal morpheme has come to signal the presence of an indefinite object. The typological goal, to which this is but an initial approach, is to link particular types of historical grammaticalizations to particular types of readings in modern languages.	Daniel Kaufman
6.40–7.00	Extraction evidence on the syntax of Xhosa nominal expressions Because Xhosa lacks overt marking(s) of (in-)definiteness comparable to English a and the, the size and category of nominal expressions is unclear: are they DPs, NPs, or something in between? I present syntactic tests proposed in Bošković (2005, 2011) and apply them to Xhosa. I show that Xhosa does not pattern with DP-less Serbo-Croatian in having free extraction from nominals. Object marking makes possible extraction from Xhosa nominals, but only of prenominal demonstratives. I argue that (i) Xhosa nominals are phasal DPs and (ii) agreement can “unlock” a phase for extraction from its edge – not for extraction from its interior (Van Urk & Richards 2015). [slides]	Vicki Carstens
7.30 – 8.30	Dinner	2nd floor Luce Hall —free but please register here

we gratefully acknowledge the support of CLAIS @ Yale

---