Speaker: Ka-Fai Yip
Date and time: Tuesday, 29 September, 4 p.m. – 5.30 p.m.
Venue: TRiSS Seminar Room, Arts Building, Trinity College Dublin
There are several pathways for syntactic structures to be “silent” in the course of derivation: (1a) Copy Deletion, as licensed by movement chain formation (Nunes 1995); (1b) ellispis, as licensed by LF/syntactic parallelism with a linguistic antecedent (Merchant 2001); and, sometimes less discussed, (1c) shared/multidominant nodes as licensed by structural relations created by Parallel Merge (Wilder 1999; Citko 2005; Gračanin-Yuksek 2007). This study offers a novel diagnostic for (1c), namely, focus association of exclusive particles ‘only’, which requires a c-command relation that (1a-b) fail to create. Three cross-linguistic case studies are presented: Right Node Raising, syntactic amalgams, and Right Dislocation.
Ka-Fai Yip obtained his Ph.D. in Linguistics from Yale University and is currently a Research Fellow at Trinity College Dublin. His research interests lie in syntax, semantics, and their interfaces with prosody, with a focus on Cantonese and other (South)east Asian languages including Mandarin and Vietnamese. He is also interested in language variation measured by corpus, heritage Cantonese (in Toronto and in Saigon), and Cantonese learning and teaching. He has published articles in renowned journals such as Natural Language & Linguistic Theory and Journal of East Asian Linguistics.