Aliaksei Akimenka
PhD Candidate - Department of Linguistics

TITLE
Rethinking A-Movement: Raising to Object without Internal Merge

ABSTRACT
While displacement is a ubiquitous phenomenon in natural language, its mechanics remain “murky and controversial” (Branigan, 2011). For much of the history of generative grammar, displacement was considered an “imperfection,” an “unexplained property of UG” (Chomsky, 2013, 2015). In the 2000s, Chomsky (2004) addressed this issue directly, proposing that the mechanism of movement could be subsumed under the basic structure-building operation Merge. However, this approach still leaves one pressing question unanswered: What drives syntactic movement? This question is far from trivial, being fundamental to generative syntax theory, especially within the Minimalist Program (Lasnik, 2006). Most research in Minimalism has aimed to identify a legitimate driving force for syntactic movement, with various candidates proposed, such as the EPP, Case, or Labeling. Nonetheless, what is most concerning about all possible movement triggers is their seemingly ad hoc nature, as they are motivated only by the observed “dislocation effects.” In my dissertation, I propose tackling this question from a different perspective - by abandoning the cause-and-effect approach to syntactic movement. Cause-and-effect (goal-driven) processes may be more intuitive and easier to conceptualize, but very often they prevent us from understanding the true nature of things (Chi et al., 2012; Shtulman, 2017; 2023).

In this talk, I will present part of my dissertation project, arguing that A-movement of the infinitival subject in Raising-to-Object (RtO) constructions (Sylvie believes syntax to be boring) does not result from Internal Merge or any other transformational operation. Instead, I propose that this movement is a by-product of the structure-building operation. Similarly, I argue that the wide/narrow scope (de re/de dicto) ambiguity - traditionally associated with RtO constructions and considered evidence for A-movement - is not due to the presence of an identical copy of the raised infinitival subject NP inside the complement. Rather, the scope ambiguity in RtO is an emergent phenomenon arising from the interplay of two opposing constraints at the semantic interface (SEM).

Jeonghwa Cho
PhD Candidate - Department of Linguistics

TITLE
Sentence production and comprehension from a cross-linguistic perspective

ABSTRACT
Languages may have some universal commonality but also are substantially different each other. Indeed, parametric variations such as different word orders and morphological systems lead to distinct processing mechanisms both during production (e.g., Hwang and Kaiser, 2014; Norcliff et al., 2015) and comprehension (e.g., Kamide et al., 2003; Vasishth et al., 2010). In this talk, I present results from an eye-tracking study and an EEG (electroencephalography) study that show how sentence production and comprehension mechanisms are similar and/or different in two typologically different languages, English and Korean, focusing on the time course of those processes and their interaction with argument structure.

This event is hybrid, if you'd like to attend virtually please join via Zoom:
https://umich.zoom.us/j/97196195023