Uses of cross-linguistic semantics

Donka Farkas, UCSC/Princeton

Donka Farkas will give a lecture on Friday, Oct 11, starting at 10:30 AM, in Room 103 at 10 Washington Place. It is a guest lecture in Anna Szabolcsi's seminar on "Theoretically significant cross-linguistic research in formal semantics," and so it will be longer and involve more questions and discussion than a usual Friday lecture. Beyond regular seminar participants, it is open to interested students and colleagues. See the abstract below and note the recommended advance reading.

Abstract

In this talk I will consider some ways in which a cross-linguistic perspective has enriched the theoretical and empirical semantics landscape. Following Anna Szabolcsi's suggestion, this will be an unabashedly autobiographical talk. It will touch on the following topics:
(a) DP semantics, with special attention to Differential Object Marking (DOM) and specificity
(b) Mood selection in complement clauses
(c) Polarity particles
As reading, I suggest a paper on topic (b): D. F. Farkas, 1992 `On the semantics of subjunctive complements', in Romance Languages and Modern Linguistic Theory, Paul Hirschbuhler and Konrad Koerner (eds.) John Benjamins, pp. 69 - 105.