The Department of Linguistics will be hosting a talk by Jason Merchant (UChicago) as part of our Spring Colloquia series this Friday February 12th, from 4-6pm (online). Title and abstract below.
Do roots or words lexically select? New and old puzzles
Abstract: Selection is the most basic syntactic relation. Capturing the dependencies between morphemes, words, and phrases is the basic task of any syntactic theory, and the ones that go under the rubric of selection are the most basic of these. A majority of word roots in English show uniform selectional properties across their various instantiations in verbs, nouns, or adjectives: compare 'rely on, reliance on, reliant on'. But I show that there are hundreds of roots that display nonuniform selectional behavior: their selectional class depends on whether the root is realized as a verb, a noun, or an adjective ('pride oneself on, pride in, proud of'). Under recent approaches to the syntax of categorization, this means that two syntactic heads are required to determine the selection: the root and the categorizer. Similar puzzles arise in German with selected prepositions of separable prefix verbs and with diptotic prepositions, in English with verb-particle-preposition idioms ('look up to'='admire'), and in Arabic varieties where template+root can determine prepositional selection (Hewett 2021). I show that these facts are problematic for standard Merge, and for a previous proposal of my own; I suggest an alternative that involves joint selection, implemented as low selectional features depending on the (possibly stochastic) copresence of certain higher objects.
For video link please contact Robin Jenkins.
For more information, contact: Robin Jenkins at robin.jenkins@uconn.edu