Selected Talks & Handouts
(for a complete list of talks, see my CV)
- “Natural language without semiosis” (abstract, slides)
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November 2021:
- invited talk, presented at the Moscow Higher School of Economics Linguistics Speaker Series — Moscow
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October 2021:
- invited talk, presented at the Stony Brook University Linguistics Colloquium — New York, NY
- invited talk, presented at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Linguistics Colloquium — Cambridge, MA
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September 2021:
- invited talk, presented at the 14th annual conference on Syntax, Phonology and Language Analysis (SinFonIJA 14) — Novi Sad
- invited talk, presented at the Cornell University Linguistics Colloquium (CLC) — Ithaca, NY
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May 2021:
- Georg-August-Universität Göttingen Ling Colloquium
- Guest lecture given at Rajesh Bhatt’s class at UMass Amherst
- slides and other materials from this lecture can be downloaded here
- November 2020:
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October 2020:
- University of Rochester Linguistics Colloquium
- USC Syntax+ Reading Group
- Penn State Morpho-Syntax Syndicate
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November 2021:
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September 2021: “The building-blocks of language”
- invited talk, presented as part of Abralin ao Vivo (the Brazilian Linguistics Association’s “Linguists Online” talk series), with commentary by Howard Lasnik
- April 2021: poster and talk at the 39th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL 39) — Tucson, AZ (virtual)
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October 2020: “Waving goodbye to Ferdinand: natural language is not composed of Saussurean signs” (abstract)
- invited talk, presented at the Tel Aviv University Linguistics Colloquium (virtual)
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July 2020, with Asia Pietraszko: “Words and other things: what do you need to list in your head?”
- mini-course at V‑NYI 2020
- Asia and I are happy to share our slides with any interested individuals. If you are interested, drop me a line.
- mini-course at V‑NYI 2020
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October 2019: “The Anaphor Agreement Effect: further evidence against binding-as-agreement”
- invited talk at the University of Oslo
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May 2019: Three talks on “Syntax & modularity”
- invited talks, CASTL (The Center for Advanced Study in Theoretical Linguistics) at the University of Tromsø (The Arctic University of Norway) — Tromsø
- talk 1, at the Thirty million theories of features workshop:
“What are phi-features supposed to do, and where?” – handout
- talk 2, at CASTL:
- talk 3, at CASTL:
- talk 1, at the Thirty million theories of features workshop:
- invited talks, CASTL (The Center for Advanced Study in Theoretical Linguistics) at the University of Tromsø (The Arctic University of Norway) — Tromsø
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May 2019: “The modular locus of the Person Case Constraint”
- Person & Perspective: a workshop in honor of María Luisa Zubizarreta — Los Angeles, CA
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September 2018: “The Anaphor Agreement Effect: further evidence against binding-as-agreement”
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1st Annual Thematic Workshop of Linguistics in Gottingen (LinG1) — Gottingen
(theme: “Agreement and Anaphoricity”)
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1st Annual Thematic Workshop of Linguistics in Gottingen (LinG1) — Gottingen
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June 2018: “How to tell a syntactic phenomenon when you see it”
- invited talk, Groningen Syntax Workshop — Groningen
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December 2017: “Assessing the morphosemantic program for phi-features: the prospects of a cross-modularly stable representation”
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10th Brussels Conference on Generative Linguistics (BCGL 10) — Brussels
(theme: “The morphology and semantics of person and number”)
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10th Brussels Conference on Generative Linguistics (BCGL 10) — Brussels
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October 2017: “No case for agreement (as a causer of case)”
- special session on “the Typology of Case” at the 48th meeting of the North East Linguistic Society (NELS 48) — Reykjavík
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February 2017: “Case in 2017: some thoughts”
- invited talk, Workshop in Honor of David Pesetsky’s 60th Birthday — Cambridge, MA
- with Theodore Levin, “m-merger as relabeling: a new approach to head movement and noun-incorporation”
- March 2017: poster presented at the 40th GLOW (Generative Linguistics in the Old World) Colloquium — Leiden
- February 2017: poster presented at the Workshop in Honor of David Pesetsky’s 60th Birthday — Cambridge, MA
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February 2017: “Privativity in Syntax”
- invited talk, 43rd annual conference of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (BLS 43) — Berkeley, CA
- “What the PCC tells us about ‘abstract’ agreement, head movement, and locality”
- February 2017: invited talk, Berkeley Syntax & Semantics Circle — Berkeley, CA
- September 2016: invited talk, Stanford Workshop on Head Movement — Stanford, CA
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May 2016: invited talk, Centre for General Linguistics (ZAS) — Berlin
- UPDATE: there is now a paper
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May 2016: “Feeding relations and their breakdowns: a theory of dative intervention”
- invited talk, IGRA Colloquium Series (University of Leipzig) — Leipzig
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October 2015: “Head movement, phrasal movement, and clitic doubling: towards a principled typology of locality conditions”
- invited talk, 46th meeting of the North East Linguistic Society (NELS 46) — Montreal, QC
- UPDATE: there is now a paper
- invited talk, 46th meeting of the North East Linguistic Society (NELS 46) — Montreal, QC
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October 2015: “Aspect-tense dissociations and their consequences for case & agreement”
- invited talk, Cornell University Workshop on Aspect — Ithaca, NY
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September 2015: “The grammar(s) of ungrammaticality”
- invited talk, “How to Make Things Happen in the Grammar: the Implementation of Obligatoriness” (Workshop held as part of TbiLLC 2015: the Eleventh International Tbilisi Symposium on Language, Logic and Computation) — Tbilisi
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August 2015: “Case and agreement in generative grammar”
- plenary lectures, 17th Seoul International Conference on Generative Grammar (SICOGG 17), Kyung Hee University — Seoul
- “Upwards and onwards”
- April 2015: New York University Syntax “Brown-Bag” — New York, NY
- April 2015: invited talk, University of Connecticut Linguistics Colloquium — Storrs, CT
- March 2015: “Syntactic operations exceed what the interfaces can account for (or: The heartbreak of interface-driven syntax)”
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February 2015: “Beyond interface conditions”
- invited talk, UCLA Linguistics Colloquium — Los Angeles, CA
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January 2015: “Scales & Hierarchies as a Window into the Domain-Specificity Question”
- invited talk, University of Maryland Language Science Center “Winter Storm“ — College Park, MD
- “The syntax (and morphology) of non‑valuation”
- October 2014: invited talk, UMass Amherst Linguistics Colloquium — Amherst, MA
- October 2014: invited talk, University of Delaware Linguistics Colloquium — Newark, DE
- September 2014: invited talk, Georgetown University Department of Linguistics Friday Speaker Series — Washington, DC
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April 2014: “Correlation and causation in case & agreement”
- invited talk, University of Maryland Department of Linguistics Colloquium — College Park, MD
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February 2014: “Beyond interface conditions”
- invited talk, Cornell University Linguistics Colloquium (CLC) — Ithaca, NY
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September 2013, with Jessica Coon: “Severing Differential Subject Marking from ergativity”
- Workshop on Differential Subject Marking and Ergativity, at the 46th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE 2013) — Split (Croatia)
- has since been written up as a paper
- Workshop on Differential Subject Marking and Ergativity, at the 46th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE 2013) — Split (Croatia)
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August 2013, with Jaklin Kornfilt: “Nominative as no case at all: an argument from raising-to-accusative in Sakha”
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9th Workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics (WAFL 9) — Ithaca, NY
- has since been written up as a paper
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9th Workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics (WAFL 9) — Ithaca, NY
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November 2012: “Partial agreement and the direction of valuation”
- invited talk, McGill University Ling-Lunch — Montreal, QC
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September 2012, with Theodore Levin: “Case in Sakha: are two modalities really necessary?”
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Annual Meeting of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain (LAGB 2012) — Manchester (UK)
- has since been written up as a paper
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Annual Meeting of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain (LAGB 2012) — Manchester (UK)
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March 2012: “Syntactic ergativity in Q’anjob’al”
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MIT Syntax Square — Cambridge, MA
- has since been written up as a paper
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MIT Syntax Square — Cambridge, MA
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February 2012: “Agreement in Kichean and Zulu: filtration vs. strict generativity”
- New York University Syntax “Brown-Bag” — New York, NY
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December 2011: “Filters vs. Triggers: deriving the obligatoriness of agreement”
- invited talk, 6th Brussels Conference on Generative Linguistics (BCGL 6) — Brussels
(theme: “Configurations of agreement”)
- invited talk, 6th Brussels Conference on Generative Linguistics (BCGL 6) — Brussels
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December 2011: “Against ‘crashes’: evidence from Kichean and Zulu”
- invited talk, Ben-Gurion University Linguistics Colloquium — Beer-Sheva (Israel)
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April 2011, with Jessica Coon: “Towards a unified account of person splits”
- 47th annual meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society (CLS 47) — Chicago, IL
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29th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL 29) — Tucson, AZ
- has since been written up as a paper
- “The nature of syntactic computation: evidence from agreement”
- January 2011: invited talk, LUCL Syntax Lab — Leiden (Netherlands)
- March 2011: Polinsky Language Lab, Harvard University — Cambridge, MA
- with Jessica Coon, “Transitivity in Chol: a new argument for the Split VP Hypothesis”
- January 2011: 85th Winter Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA 85) — Pittsburgh, PA
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October 2010: 41st meeting of the North East Linguistic Society (NELS 41) — Philadelphia, PA
- has since been written up as a paper
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October 2010: “The origins of obligatoriness: evidence from agreement failures”
- invited talk, Yale University Syntax Colloquium — New Haven, CT
- “Basque unergatives, case-competition, and ergative as inherent case”
- January 2010: 84th Winter Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA 84) — Baltimore, MD
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November 2009: EHU Workshop on Ergativity — Bilbao (The Basque Country / Spain)
- has since been written up as a paper
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April 2008: “Breaking agreements: distinguishing agreement and clitic-doubling by their failures”
- invited talk, CUNY Syntax-Supper — New York, NY
- has since been written up as a paper
- invited talk, CUNY Syntax-Supper — New York, NY
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March 2008: “Long-distance agreement in Basque, locally speaking”
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31st GLOW (Generative Linguistics in the Old World) Colloquium — Newcastle (UK)
- has since been written up as a paper
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31st GLOW (Generative Linguistics in the Old World) Colloquium — Newcastle (UK)
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April 2007: “Perfect domains”
- 26th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL 26) — Berkeley, CA
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May 2006: “Feature-inheritance at the phase boundary”
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Edges in Syntax — Nicosia (Cyprus)
- has since been written up as a paper
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Edges in Syntax — Nicosia (Cyprus)
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October 2005: “Argument-mapping and extraction”
- poster, 36th meeting of the North East Linguistic Society (NELS 36) — Amherst, MA