Circumambient patterns in syntax

๐Ÿ•‘ 12 min • ๐Ÿ‘ค Thomas Graf • ๐Ÿ“† November 11, 2019 in Discussions • ๐Ÿท subregular, syntax, phonology, tone plateauing, movement, complementizer agreement

Last week I gave an invited talk at UMass on the subregular program and the computational parallels it reveals between syntax and phonology. If youโ€™re curious, the slides are on my website. The talk went over a lot better than I expected, and there were lots of great questions. UMass has a tradition of letting students ask questions first before the faculty get to chime in, and the students were relentless in a good way. I think there was only 5 minutes left for faculty questions at the end. It was a great experience, and probably the best question period Iโ€™ve ever been on the receiving end of.

Anyways, after the colloquium Brian Dillon asked a few questions about more complex movement cases, and those are very interesting because theyโ€™re yet another instance of computational parallelism between phonology and syntax: tone plateauing = movement-driven complementizer agreement.


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