Annual Report 2008

Transcription

Annual Report 2008

Annual Report 2008
CASTL is a Norwegian Centre
of Excellence (CoE).
The CoE scheme was initiated by the Research Council of Norway, and the designation in 2002 of 13 Centres of Excellence
marked the conclusion of the most farreaching selection process ever to envelop Norwegian research. The process was
repeated in 2006, resulting in the creation
of eight additional CoEs in 2007.
The scheme entails that outstanding research groups, operating under co-ordinated management and research plans,
receive long-term funding to engage in
world-class frontier research. The CoEs
receive annual grants from the Research
Council averaging 10 to 20 million NOK
for a maximum of ten years, based on
host institution pledges to cover a considerable proportion of the CoEs’ expenditures. Moreover, the CoEs are free to
seek funding from other sources.
The 13 CoEs underwent a midterm evaluation in 2006. Self-evaluations by each
Center and its host institution were sent to
three international experts for evaluation.
The three reports about each CoE were
then passed along to a single scientific
committee of international experts, which
also heard presentations by each Center.
They concluded that the CoE scheme
has had a positive impact on the standing of Norwegian research internationally. Their unified report on the 13 Centers
formed the basis for a decision by the
Board of Directors of the Research Council of Norway to extend the original 13
CoEs for an additional 5-year period.
The complete report is available at
www.rcn.no.
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Photo: Kristine Nyborg
Contents
A Word from the Leadership...........................................................................................3
The People.................................................................................................................................4
The Work
Nanosyntax – A New Approach to Language................................................8
Space Exploration.......................................................................................................... 10
Verbs at the Syntax-Semantics Interface........................................................ 12
DP-Architecture.............................................................................................................. 14
Revisiting Old Questions in Sound Pattern Research ............................ 15
Saami Language Documentation and (Re)vitalization.......................... 17
The Language Acquisition Group....................................................................... 18
Postdoc & Researcher Projects in 2008............................................................ 20
PhD Projects in 2008.................................................................................................... 21
Study at CASTL.................................................................................................................... 23
PhD Dissertations in 2008.......................................................................................... 24
CASTL Related Projects................................................................................................ 26
The Output............................................................................................................................. 28
The Numbers........................................................................................................................ 30
CASTL Events Conferences – Workshops – Seminars................................ 31
CASTL Guests........................................................................................................................ 34
Greetings from CASTL visitors................................................................................ 35
Front page photo: The characteristic Labyrint at the University of Tromsø.
A Word [»w®˘`d|]
from the Leadership
2008 was the first year of CASTL’s second 5-year period as
a Norwegian Center of Excellence, a year that saw several
changes in the team of senior researchers. Ove Lorentz
decided to step down as a senior researcher, and CASTL
thanks him for his work during the first CoE period. Gillian
Ramchand and Bruce Morén-Duolljá joined the team at
the beginning of the year, strengthening CASTL's profile in syntax and phonology. In the fall of 2008, CASTL’s
Director for the past six years, Curt Rice, was elected Vice
Rector for Research and Development at the University
of Tromsø. In his new function, Rice will be able to apply
many of the lessons learned at CASTL in a larger arena.
Organizing a workshop in his honor in December 2008,
the CASTL community showed their gratitude to Curt
Rice for six years of excellent leadership.
Taking over his function as Director of CASTL, Marit
Westergaard has joined the team of senior researchers
from January 1, 2009. This means that her field of research, language acquisition, has advanced from an affiliated project to a core research area at CASTL. This is
reflected already in the annual report for 2008.
This annual report also contains much information
about the research done at CASTL. On the following
pages, the six senior researchers present the core ideas
of their projects and the main achievements of the past
year. The research carried out by our post-doctoral fellows and other CASTL researchers is also described, as are
some CASTL-affiliated projects. Furthermore, we are very
proud to present the PhD projects of some of our more
advanced students. During 2008, the second CASTL PhD
was completed (Sylvia Blaho), as well as a CASTL-affiliated one (Yulia Rodina), and two further PhD dissertations were submitted (one already successfully defend-
ed at the beginning of 2009, the other one coming up
this spring).
2008 was an exciting year at CASTL, with several activities and events, and many international guests. As usual,
the annual report contains quotes from some of them
about their experience at CASTL. Highlights of the year
were Steven Pinker's visit in March, when he was awarded
an honorary doctorate at the University of Tromsø, and a
conference on Creole languages in November. The Saami
Documentation and Revitalization workshop in February,
which was the result of collaboration between CASTL
and the Department of Language and Linguistics, was
also a great success.
The work carried out by the CASTL community has
resulted in a number of publications in 2008, and as usual,
CASTL people have been especially active at international
conferences, presenting the research done in Tromsø to
audiences all over the world. Selections of both publications and presentations are provided in this report.
As a former CASTL affiliate, the new director has
benefited from CASTL's impact on the larger linguistics
community at the University of Tromsø for many years,
in terms of occasional travel support, funding for the
language acquisition lab, and the inspiring atmosphere
that CASTL provides. At the same time, the new director
also acknowledges that CASTL owes thanks to its many
affiliates and the Department of Language and Linguistics for providing a fruitful environment for a Center of
Excellence. In the remaining years of the CoE period, we
intend to strengthen the good relations to the Department of Language and Linguistics and continue to build
an even stronger linguistics community at the University
of Tromsø.
Tromsø/Oslo, March 2009
Kirsti Koch Christensen
Chair of the Board of Directors
Curt Rice
CASTL Director 2003-2008
Marit Westergaard
CASTL Director, 2009-
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The People [»pHipl˘`]
Senior Researchers
Professor Curt Rice,
Director
Phonological theory, OT, metrical theory,
comparative Germanic phonology
Professor Gillian C. Ramchand
Syntax-semantics interface: verbs, event structure,
scales, tense, aspect, modality, South Asian
languages, Scottish Gaelic
Professor Peter Svenonius
Syntax, linguistic theory, syntax-semantics
interface, morphology, typology, expressions of
space and motion, adpositions, categories and
features
Professor Michal Starke
Nanosyntax, architecture of grammar, functional
projections, syntax-phonology interface, syntaxconcepts interface, locality and wh-movement,
templatic effects, clitics
Professor Knut Tarald Taraldsen
Syntactic theory, Scandinavian and Romance
syntax
Senior Researcher Bruce Morén-Duolljá
Phonology, feature theory, weight theory, tone
theory, phonetics-phonology relations, substancefree, Saami documentation and (re)vitalization
Postdoctoral Research Fellows/Researchers
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Øystein Nilsen
Syntax, semantics, lexical categories
CASTL
Isabelle Roy
The syntax-semantics interface
CASTL Graduate School
Luisa Marti
Semantics, pragmatics, indefinites, context
dependence
The Research Council of Norway
Gunnar Hrafn Hrafnbjargarson
Case and agreement, expletives, modals, person
restrictions, V2, verb movement
NORMS
Minjeong Son
Syntax-(event-)semantics interface, nanosyntax,
complex predicates (causatives, resultatives, directed
motion and serial verbs), spatial and motion
expressions in Korean and Indonesian/Malay
YFF project: Moving Right Along
Øystein A. Vangsnes
Syntax, dialect studies, Nordic languages
NORMS
Research Fellows (PhD students)
Sylvia Blaho
Phonological representation, Government
Phonology, voicing-related phenomena, syllabic
Consonants
CASTL
Xuan Di
Syntactic theory; Mandarin Chinese (Beijing
Dialect)
Quota student
Madeleine Halmøy
Arbitrariness, the relationship between formmeaning and interpretation, Norwegian, variation,
nominal categories
CASTL
Marina Pantcheva
Nanosyntax of spatial expressions; goal, source
and route paths; location
Björn Lundquist
Syntax, double object constructions and modality.
CASTL
Monika Bašić
Syntax
Peter Muriungi
General Bantu syntax, the syntax of focus, the
syntax of questions
CASTL
Pavel Caha
Nanosyntax, case, adpositions, templates, spell out,
Slavic (esp. Czech)
Kaori Takamine
Syntax, Japanese, hierarchy of prepositions
CASTL
Marleen Susanne van de Vate
Diachronic Study of the Tense, Aspect and Modality
system in Saámaka
Yulia Rodina
Morphology, Grammatical gender, First Language
Acquisition
Quota student
Islam Youssef
Phonological theory, feature geometry, segmental
phonology, optimality theory, Semitic, Arabic
dialectology
Peter Jurgec
Phonology, optimality theory, feature theory,
phonetics-phonology interface, loanword
phonology, exceptionality in phonology, tone,
acoustic phonetics, Slavic languages, Slovenian
Pavel V. Iosad
Phonology; its interface with morphology and
phonetics; formal aspects of phonological theory;
Celtic languages; Slavic languages
CASTL
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Éva Dékány
Syntax, Hungarian language and linguistics,
verbal particles, spatial expressions, cleft and focus
constructions
CASTL
Andrea Márkus
Locality, ellipsis, subject/nonsubject asymmetries,
passives and Case
CASTL
Naoyuki Yamato
Japanese syntax
CASTL
Rosmin Mathew
Syntax
CASTL
Dragana Šurkalovič
Prosodic Phonology, especially the Prosodic
Hierarchy, Multiple Spell-Out theories and their
implications for the Syntax-Phonology Interface,
and modelling the Interface in Optimality Theory
Administrative staff
Christin Kristoffersen
Head of Administration
Gry Gaard
Executive Officer (until
February 2008)
Tore Børseth Bentz
Higher Executive Officer
(from October 2008)
Professor Kirsti Koch
Christensen
University of Bergen
(chair)
Associate Professor Alf
Håkon Hoel
University of Tromsø
Professor Elisabet
Engdahl
University of Gothenburg
Professor Peter
Svenonius
CASTL
Professor Hans Bennis
The Meertens Institute
Professor David Adger
Queen Mary University of
London
Board of Directors
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Affiliates
Merete Anderssen
Associate Professor/
Postdoctoral Research
Fellow
Antonio Fábregas
Associate Professor
Tore Nesset
Professor
Helene N. Andreassen
Research Fellow
Thorbjörg Hróarsdóttir
Researcher
Yulia Rodina
Fellow
Berit Anne Bals Baal
Researcher
Laura A. Janda
Professor
Mai Elin Tungseth
Associate Professor
Kristine Bentzen
Fellow
Martin Krämer
Associate Professor
Marit Westergaard
Associate Professor
Patrik Bye
Fellow
Ove Lorentz
Associate Professor
Anna-Lena Wiklund
Fellow
Philipp Conzett
Research Fellow
Chantal Lyche
Professor
Christine Østbø
Research Fellow
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The Work [»w®>`kH]
Nanosyntax – A New Approach to Language
Michal Starke
Nanosyntax is a new approach to the architecture of
language, designed to make (better) sense of the new
empirical picture emerging from recent years of syntactic research. It is a large-scale project, addressing a wide
array of issues, ranging from big issues such as the modularity of language, to fine details, such as the derivation
of allomorphy in irregular patterns of given languages
and its interaction with syntactic structures. Rethinking
the basics opens a period of flux, with many analytical
options becoming available and needing to be explored
- the CASTL funding has given us the time to tackle such
a large-scale project and seriously investigate the many
theoretical options. The results of this fundamental research are now starting to be visible, with the framework
stabilising and various researchers adopting it and producing results based on it. Two PhD dissertations have
been submitted last year (one of them now defended)
which are closely based on the nanosyntax framework,
and more are coming up.
The atoms of language are smaller than we thought
The premise leading to the nanosyntactic project is very
simple: Syntactic research has produced beautiful empirical generalisations over the last 30 years, and these generalisations have led to a profound change in the kind of
mental representations (“syntactic structures”) attributed
to speakers. This profound shift has however remained
disconnected from syntactic theory, staying within the
empirical and notational domain. The theory used on
the new structures is largely similar to the theory used 30
years ago (despite terminological changes). That theory
is however not a good fit with the new results - our starting question was thus simple: what is the new empirical
picture telling us? What do we learn from those beautiful
generalisations?
A posteriori, the answer is surprisingly simple - though
with deep consequences: the new syntactic structures
are much larger, and growing by the day, and as a result,
their ingredients (their “terminal” nodes) are getting much
smaller. This turns out to contradict a fundamental tenet
of the field: the deeply ingrained assumption that the ingredients of syntactic structure (the terminal nodes) are
lexical items, “words” or “morphemes”. The pervasive view
is that syntax is merely a way of arranging such lexical
items. As syntactic structures grow however, their termi8
nals become smaller than individual morphemes - the
terminals become smaller than morphemes. The field is
thus in a position in which its fundamental assumptions
are at odds with the results of its best research. We thus
need to reconsider the orthodoxy, questioning the very
premise that syntax operates on lexical items. Nanosyntax is the result of doing that.
Watch your size - ongoing work in Nanosyntax
An immediate consequence of terminals being submorphemic is that many - perhaps most - morphemes
will span several terminals. And therefore they will correspond to an entire “subtree” rather than corresponding
to a terminal. This means that the lexicon contains “subtrees”, syntactic trees, paired with phonological and conceptual information. This view not only makes sense of
the large syntactic trees delivered by empirical research,
but it also opens a large number of new insights and
research avenues. For instance, freeing the lexical items
from their terminals allows different lexical items to be
of different sizes. This gives us a new tool to understand
syntactic contrasts: one avenue explored is that various
sizes of lexical elements lead to different syntactic categories (eventive nouns are “bigger” than non-eventive
nouns, verbs are bigger than nouns, etc.) and different
behaviours. Such reasonings have been explored in recent CASTL dissertations and in ongoing work.
Peter Muriungi’s dissertation on the internal structure
of Kîîtharaka (Bantu) verbs argues (among other things)
that allomorphy, idiomaticity and selection patterns in
such verbs require lexical entries of differing size, with
competition among them. Björn Lundquist’s dissertation
explores the hypothesis that different classes of deverbalizing suffixes match different sizes of the functional
sequence. This allows him to explain many otherwise unexplained gaps in the productivity of these morphemes
through competition for the lexicalisation of a tree, including competition between a phrase and a single morpheme. A semester-long seminar led by another CASTL
PhD student, Pavel Caha, has shown that patterns of allomorphy and syncretism among case affixes can be handled elegantly once the affixes are seen to be of different
structural size and compete with each other for lexicalisation of a syntactic structure. Michal Starke has led several
seminars on the underlying architecture of nanosyntax,
and has shown that the traditional issues surrounding the
English -ed idiosyncracies and allomorphies receive an
Nanosyntax – A New Approach to Language
e legant treatment in nanosyntax in terms of size. A new
line of work by Tarald Taraldsen on noun phrases shows
that the size difference offers a promising solution to another traditional problem: noun classes, ranging from 2
or 3 classes in some languages to 10-15 classes in others.
Taraldsen shows that nanosyntax offers insights both into
the issue of the small number vs. high number of noun
classes, and into the syncretism patters among class affixes. Work by Gillian Ramchand has shown that the size
difference offers an insightful solution to the traditional
issues of ‘verb types’ and their syntactic behaviours, and
work by Peter Svenonius is showing how the size consequence of nanosyntax allows us to handle cross-linguistic
patterns among prepositions and motion verbs among
others.
A new view of modularity and interfaces
Many more avenues of research are opened by nanosyntax, both within and beyond the size issue. During the
last year (2008), our attention has for instance turned to
“interface” issues - how a syntactic structure is interpreted
as a phonological and conceptual structure. On the phonological side, we have started a new line of argument in
favour of nanosyntax and at the same time contributed
to open a new and exciting empirical field: phrasal phonological templates. Phrasal templatic phenomena are
cases in which a grammatical constituent is restricted by a
phonological template (the constituent must correspond
to “two moras”, or “one syllable”, etc). In many such cases,
the constituent undergoing the phonological templatic
restriction is neither a “word” nor a “morpheme”, it is an intermediate node in the representation - a “phrasal” node.
The question is how to express the correspondence between that constituent and the phonological template.
This issue has remained a mystery, and is largely unapproachable in traditional theories. Nanosyntax however
provides an answer: since entire trees are stored in the
lexicon, a lexical entry will have no problem associating a
phonological constituent (the template) with a syntactic
phrase. Such phenomena can be handled by nanosyntax
but not by traditional syntax and they thus constitute an
important additional argument for the nanosyntax approach. This strand of thought has led to collaboration
between the phonology group and the syntax group,
with a joint seminar led by Curt Rice and Michal Starke
and collaborations with Tobias Scheer (Nice) and Sabrina
Bendjaballah (Paris), it has spurred articles on templatic
phenomena in Czech infinitival verbs (P. Caha) and an
ongoing empirical investigation of Bantu templatic reduplication.
Another “interface” issue that has started to be investigated seriously is the relationship between syntax and
the research on meaning in formal semantics. The fundamental issue there is that a fine-grained syntax does
much of the job that formal semantics is purported to
do, and hence makes a semantic “module” redundant. But
at the same time, a formal syntax by itself cannot do the
last step and deliver ‘meaning’ – i.e. truth-conditions, or
any mapping onto an outside domain. We thus need a
mapper (‘semantics’), but as soon as we have one, it becomes redundant. This issue quickly leads to difficult philosophical grounds and foundational discussions about
‘meaning’. To handle this, a joint seminar was organised
between semantics and syntax, led by Gillian Ramchand
and Michal Starke. A few possible solutions to the redundancy dilemma have already come up - all of them
involving a rethinking of the relationship between syntax and formal semantics. As it happens, other research
groups have been led on a similar path and we are establishing collaboration with them for the near future. This is
an exciting avenue of growth for nanosyntax, providing
an important piece of the puzzle.
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Space Exploration
Research into linguistic representations
of Space and the fine-structural syntax
and semantics of the category P
Peter Svenonius
This CASTL subproject investigates Space and related
topics. Specifically, we study how different languages
express spatial concepts, including both static location
descriptions (The chipmunk hid behind the wood-pile; The
wood-pile is on the south side of the house) and also descriptions of motion (Drive south; Climb over the fence).
This subproject is led by Professor Peter Svenonius and is
integrated with the Moving Right Along ‘Excellent Young
Researcher’ (Yngre fremragende forsker) project with financing from the Norwegian Research Council.
Space
Space research at CASTL builds on extensive previous
work on the syntax and semantics of spatial expressions,
including cognitive and model-theoretic semantics as
well as transformational and minimalist syntax. We examine how linguistic representations of space match cognitive models of space, determining which aspects are represented and which are left up to context, background
knowledge, and inference. In so doing, we are able to
distinguish linguistic primitives from conceptual information, and this feeds into other subprojects in establishing certain expectations for the nature of the linguistic
primitives in other functional domains such as object and
event descriptions.
Adpositions and category
Discussions of space necessarily involve adpositions
(prepositions and postpositions), since languages so frequently make use of adpositions in spatial descriptions.
At CASTL, we have been exploring the hypothesis that
functional structure is much more fine-grained than is
usually assumed, and we have been applying this to adpositions, with the result that the adpositions are broken
down into multiple syntactic projections, each of which
represents a meaning component.
One such meaning component that has been the
focus of work in 2008 is the one establishing a relation10
ship between the Figure and Ground (Talmy’s terms for
the object being located and the reference object with
respect to which it is located). We have isolated certain
meaning components which we believe to be centrally
concerned with the Figure-Ground configuration, which
we have linked to the tendency for ‘functional’ interpretations of spatial expressions documented in experimental work. We have investigated the ways in which these
meaning components have effects on syntax, thereby
motivating a specific aspect of the continuing decomposition of P.
Cross-linguistic comparison
An advantage of working with spatial descriptions is that
there is a concrete foundation for comparing expressions across languages. The CASTL group has collected
information on over 100 languages spoken all over the
world, from Arctic languages to languages of the Khoisan
people in southern Africa, and from Celtic languages in
the west of Europe to Austronesian languages in the east
of Asia, as well as North and South American languages
and Australian and New Guinean ones.
Space Exploration
The CASTL group has conducted detailed fieldwork
in Tromsø, drawing on the international community in
Tromsø to explore such languages as Kîîtharaka from
Kenya, Shua from Botswana, Farsi from Iran, and many
others. In other cases, field expeditions have been conducted to gather data in India, Indonesia, California, and
other locations.
The main languages focused on in 2008 have been
Korean and several languages of Indonesia. In conjunction with the NORMS project, on-site fieldwork has also
been conducted on several Nordic varieties, including
Faroese and Älvdalian.
Nanosyntax
The syntactically active meaning components which
we are studying are not always isolable in distinct morphemes; thus, the theoretical framework of Nanosyntax
is employed in order to make sense of the fit between
syntax and the lexicon.
Selected publications appearing in 2008
Pantcheva, Marina. 2008. The place of Place in Persian, in
Syntax and Semantics of Spatial P, ed by Anna Asbury,
Jakub Dotlacil, Berit Gehrke, and Rick Nouwen, pp.
305-330. John Benjamins, Amsterdam.
Son, Minjeong and Peter Cole. 2008. An event-based account of -kan constructions in Standard Indonesian.
Language 84.1, pp. 120-160.
Son, Minjeong and Peter Svenonius. 2008, Microparameters of Cross-linguistic variation: Directed motion and
Resultatives (with Minjeong Son), in the Proceedings
of the 27th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics,
ed. by Natasha Abner and Jason Bishop, pp. 388-396.
Cascadilla Press, Somerville, Ma.
Svenonius, Peter. 2008, Projections of P, in Syntax and Semantics of Spatial P, ed by Anna Asbury, Jakub Dotlačil,
Berit Gehrke, and Rick Nouwen, pp. 63-84. John Benjamins, Amsterdam.
Svenonius, Peter. 2008 ‘Russian Prefixes are Phrasal’ in Formal Description of Slavic Languages, edited by Gerhild
Zybatow, Luka Szucsich, Uwe Junghanns, and Roland
Meyer, pp. 526-537. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main.
Selected presentations
In 2008, Peter Svenonius held invited lectures on material
related to this project at the University of Maryland, the
University of Southern California, the University of California at Santa Cruz, The Center for the Study of Mind in
Nature in Oslo, Nanzan University in Nagoya, Osaka Uni-
Photo: Peter Svenonius
versity, Senshu University in Tokyo, Dongguk University in
Seoul, the European Society for Philosophy and Psychology
annual meeting in Utrecht, the Syntactic Structures conference at the Russian State University for the Humanities in Moscow, and the Russian Academy of Science in
Moscow. He also presented nonspecialist presentations
on these themes in a public forum in Tromsø on the occasion of Steven Pinker being awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Tromsø, and on the Språkteigen
radio program. The team also presented papers selected
by anonymous refereed abstract at the Workshop on Locative Case in Nijmegen (Pantcheva), Complex Predicates in
Iranian Languages in Paris (Pantcheva), ConSOLE in Paris
(Pantcheva), Japanese and Korean Linguistics in New York
(Son), the International Conference on East Asian Linguistics
in Vancouver (Son), the International Congress of Linguistics
in Seoul (Son), the Penn Linguistics Colloquium in Philadelphia (Son), the International Symposium on Indonesian/
Malay in Leiden, the Netherlands (Son and Svenonius),
the West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics at UCLA
in Los Angeles (Son and Svenonius), and the Second Conference on Älvdalian in Älvdalen, Sweden (Svenonius).
Http://www.hum.uit.no/mra/.
11
Verbs at the Syntax-Semantics Interface
Research into the fine-structural syntax
and semantics of the category V
Gillian Ramchand
This CASTL sub-project, led by Gillian Ramchand, integrates a detailed attention to compositional semantics
with the morphological and syntactic facts about verbal
structures and argument realisation across languages.
Nanosyntax and Lexicalization
Increasing evidence from morphological patterning and
event structural entailments seems to indicate that the
fine structure of the verbal domain is more articulated
than classical notions of the VP would suggest. Ramchand
has recently proposed in a book published in 2008 (Verb
Meaning and the Lexicon: A First Phase Syntax, CUP) that the
V of classical phrase structure be split into projections corresponding to `initiation’, `process’ and `result’. Her work at
CASTL during 2008 continues to explore the consequences of that hypothesis for both argument structure realisation and complex predicational structures. As a part of the
nanosyntax hypothesis being pursued at CASTL, she has
particularly focused on issues of lexicalization, where either
single monomorphemic words lexicalize large chunks of
syntactically elaborated phrase structure (as in the morphemically simple, but event-structurally complex verb
in English destroy), or alternatively where several distinct
verbal `words’ are used in monoclausal predicational structures expressing the very same thing (as found for example
in South Asian languages). For the latter kinds of cases, she
has been testing hypotheses related to `underassociation’,
which is intended to constrain the operation of The Superset Principle in a particular way, while at the same time accounting for certain facts of syntactic selection. Related to
these issues, Ramchand led a seminar on Complex Predications in the fall of 2007, which initiated work on various languages from the community of CASTL researchers, leading
to a Nordlyd volume of Tromsø Working Papers published
in 2008 especially devoted to that topic. Ramchand also
12
gave an extended seminar series on complex predicates in
Kausani, India in May 2008, while doing fieldwork on Hindi/Urdu and Bengali. Ramchand gave invited talks on the
theory she proposes in her book at an argument structure
workshop in Lund in February 2008 and at a morphology
and lexicalization workshop in Verona in November 2008.
Structural Semantics is Syntax
One very important aspect of the work in this subproject
is the attention it pays to achieving a close match between phrase structure/morphological structure and a
compositional semantics containing a constrained set of
primitives. The hypothesis is that certain abstract semantic notions such as event structure, predication, tense,
deictic anchoring, possible worlds, part-whole structure,
scalarity etc. are part of a structural semantics that is built
in to the central computational system. In this way, understandings of the morphosyntax and of the semantic
primitives involved in the build up of linguistic forms go
hand in hand. The project involves distinguishing the
semantic elements that are structural from those that
Verbs at the Syntax-Semantics Interface
are purely conceptual or lexical encyclopaedic. As a part
of this general strand of research in the verbal project,
Ramchand initiated a project in 2008 on the relationship
between tense and modality in the verbal extended projection, more specifically on the relationship between
the tense variable and the possible worlds variable in
currently accepted formal semantic implementations of
this kind of meaning. She ran an advanced seminar in the
fall of 2008 on that topic. The seminar involved student
and colleague collaborations from a variety of languages
including Scandinavian, German, Hungarian, Saramaccan and Russian. The working group discovered a large
crosslinguistic conspiracy of mismatches in the domain
of tense and modality between morphemic/syntactic
ordering on the one hand and semantic composition
on the other. This led to questions about the accuracy of
the functional sequence as currently proposed in cartographic models and/or the true nature of the semantic
primitives involved. Ramchand gave a presentation at the
NORMS workshop on tense and modality in Trondheim
in September on the topic. Both she and many other
members of the group are now planning more extended
written up articles building on these results.
Ramchand has interacted closely with the Explorations
of Space project in contributing to the issues of how verbal semantic structure interacts with the prepositional
domain and in the formation of resultatives.
Selected publications appearing in 2008:
Ramchand, Gillian. 2008. Verb meaning and the Lexicon.
Cambridge University Press.
Ramchand, Gillian. 2008. Lexical items in complex predications: Selection as Underassociation. Nordlyd, ed. By
Peter Svenonius and Inna Tolskaya. Vol 35: 115-141.
In Verb Meaning and the Lexicon, Ramchand analyzes the structure of
verbs, including this causative example from Hindi/Urdu.
Ramchand, Gillian. 2008. Perfectivity as aspectual definiteness: Time and the event in Russian. Lingua. Volume 118(11):1690-1715.
Ramchand, Gillian and Peter Svenonius. 2008. Mapping
a Parochial lexicon onto a universal semantics. In The
Limits of Syntactic Variation. (Theresa Biberauer, ed.).
John Benjamins. pp 219-245.
Svenonius, Peter and Inna Tolskaya (eds). 2008, Nordlyd:
Tromsø Working Papers in Linguistics (Special Volume
on Complex Predicates). Vol 35. (Contains papers by
CASTL employees including Dékány, Pantcheva, Ramchand, Son, Svenonius, van de Vate, and CASTL affiliates Hróarsdóttir and Wiklund.)
13
DP-Architecture
Knut Tarald Taraldsen
The morphosyntax of Case
In order to explore the explanatory potential of a specific
nanosyntactic conception of grammatical case, a research
seminar was devoted to ergativity in the first semester
of 2008. The seminar was based on a selection of central
studies of ergativity, including some of the papers presented in the MIT ergativity seminar the preceding year.
Three leading specialists in the field (Maria Polinsky, Julie
Legate and Milan Rezac) came to Tromsø to give talks in
connection with the seminar. The seminar also included
lab sessions with presentations by linguists in the CASTL
community. Early on, the research was channeled into an
attempt to explain a cross-linguistic correlation between
ergativity and major constituent order: There seems to be
no clear instance of an ergative SVO language. The main
line of analysis followed in the seminar focused on the
interaction between remnant VP-movement and Caselicensing within an approach to Case designed by Michal
Starke, but sketches of alternative solutions were presented along the way.
The nanosyntax of genders and noun classes:
Romance and Bantu
In addition to ergativity, research in other areas of the
nanosyntax of DPs was undertaken. A part of it led to
a case-study of the morphosyntax of gender/number
marking on nouns and adjectives in the Colonnata variety of Italian (based on Manzini & Savoia’s description)
and presented at the Workshop on Theoretical Morphology organized by Leipzig University in June 2008. We also
returned to a project initiated earlier on the noun class
prefixes in Bantu and their relation to agreement markers,
demonstratives and pronouns. To advance that strand of
research KTT spent a month at Stellenbosch University in
the summer, and returned there in December, using the
university library and consulting with colleagues at the
Department of African languages. Preliminary results of
the investigation of Southern Bantu noun class prefixes
and agreement along with a discussion of their relevance
to nanosyntax were first presented as an introduction to
nanosyntax at a student conference organized by the
Charles University in the fall. Further analysis of the Southern Bantu patterns and their bearing on current theorizing in the field of morphosyntax has provided the basis
for the research seminar on DP architecture in the first
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semester of 2009. The hypothesis argued for is that noun
class prefixes in Southern Bantu are built from formatives
each of which seems to lexicalize a fairly complex syntactic structure.
Further Research on the Architecture of DPs
Field work on Afrikaans conducted during KTT's stays in
Stellenbosch also led him to start a comparative investigation in two areas of morphosyntax, both related to the
overarching investigation of DP architecture. One is the
morphosyntax of attributive adjectives and its relation to
NP-ellipsis across West Germanic and Scandinavian (based
in part on the results from an earlier research seminar on
DP-architecture) and the other one is the morphosyntax
of particles and their relationship to adpositions in West
Germanic and Scandinavian, resurrecting in part issues
previously discussed in a presentation by Peter Svenonius and KTT at a Workshop on Comparative Germanic
Syntax, in which the behavior of certain locative particles
in Norwegian and Afrikaans was compared to the behavior of the possessor noun in the Semitic construct state.
Research in this area continues into 2009, and preliminary
results relating to the morphosyntax of determiners will
be presented in a talk at the NORMS workshop on Determination in Tromsø in March 2009.
Another piece of research relating to nouns and DP
structure is reported in a short article by KTT for a Festschrift for Guglielmo Cinque to be published in 2009, presenting an account of the well-known failure of certain
syntactic operations to apply in noun phrases.
Further research related to DP-architecture in 2008 includes Björn Lundquist’s PhD dissertation on nominalizations and participles in Swedish.
Revisiting Old Questions in Sound Pattern Research ...
... and finding new, complex, and
minimalist answers
Bruce Morén-Duolljá
Language plays a central role in both linguistic and cognitive science research. It influences how we communicate and think, and it gives us valuable information about
how the human mind works. Within the field of Generative Linguistics, we have taken for granted that most, if
not all, of the building blocks of language are specific to
language and given to us by genetics - i.e. they are innate. This includes the assumption that the mental representations of speech sounds are “hardwired” to particular
articulatory and/or auditory characteristics. While this
way of thinking has led the linguistic research of the past
50 years, there is growing evidence that many of those
things that we once thought to be unlearnable and thus
necessarily given at birth can, and probably are, learned
after all. This, combined with growing awareness of lesscommonly-studied languages and phenomena that
challenge a direct and universal phonetics-phonology
relationship (e.g. sign languages), leads to the conclusion
that it is time to reassess much of the “received wisdom”
we have inherited from the past and to search for more
satisfying and less stipulative explanations.
A unique vision
The main thrust of CASTL phonology research is the exploration of a new view of sound systems in which phonology is distinct from phonetics (i.e. “substance-free”)
and where much of segmental and suprasegmental
structure traditionally considered to be given by universal
grammar is in fact emergent and the result of very general cognitive and grammatical principles (i.e. “minimalist”). Our substance-free, minimalist perspective and our
willingness to join forces to address a single set of questions and possible solutions are what set CASTL phonology apart and are our greatest strengths.
Our research
While our work is appropriately diverse given the range
of backgrounds, interests, philosophies and languages
represented by our team, it has concentrated mainly on a
single project that looks inside individual speech sounds
(i.e. segments) to establish their feature composition and
the principles determining their internal organization.
Among other things, we have argued for the reintroduction and refining of autosegmental representations in
Photo: Peter Jurgec
contemporary phonology, focused on unresolved featural issues left unaddressed by the popular constraintbased framework, Optimality Theory, suggested that
economy and structural complexity are constraining factors in building language-particular feature specifications,
and stressed the importance of whole-language analysis
and empiricism. We have also demonstrated the value of
micro-variation in testing both empirical and theoretical
claims. Our novel approach has resulted in international
presentations and publications, seminars, workshops,
mini-courses, master’s theses and CASTL’s first phonology
doctoral dissertation. It has also played a role in innovative phonological theory building that at times dominates European phonology conferences.
15
Revisiting Old Questions in Sound Pattern Research...
Expansions and interfaces
In 2008, we took the lessons we learned from our work
on segment-internal issues and expanded our efforts
in three directions. We had a seminar, mini-course and
workshop focusing on prosody - i.e. looking outside the
segment. This work has caused us to seriously question
the universality of prosodic categories and their relationships to one another, and it has led to progress toward
a more empirically adequate model of prosody that has
a direct connection to our segment-internal concerns.
We also had two seminars addressing how phonology
interfaces with other areas of the grammar - syntax and
phonetics. With the templates seminar, we combined
forces with our syntax colleagues to look carefully at
templatic effects in morphology and phonology. One
key theoretical issue this seminar addressed was that
of modularity and whether prosody is a module on its
own or if it is a part of phonology or syntax. With the
phonetics-phonology interface seminar, we looked at
some non-trivial challenges that a phonetics-phonology
relationship pose for substance-free phonology, and we
gained a firm historical and empirical base with which
to assess “substance-full” approaches. Both of these interface seminars have provided a stepping off point for
our 2009 plans, which include a new syntax-phonology
seminar, a Laboratory Phonology mini-course and workshop, and several individual and joint presentations and
publications.
i!"
t
t
n
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Summary
2008 was a very good year for CASTL phonology. We had
many activities, identified several new directions for future exploration, and saw the fruits of our labor disseminated to the world in a number of ways. We are encouraged by our accomplishments and the recognition we
have received from our peers, and we look forward to the
challenges and new opportunities that 2009 brings.
Selected 2008 output
Blaho, Sylvia. The syntax of phonology: A radically substance-free approach. PhD dissertation.
Iosad, Pavel. Teorija optimalnosti: obzor osnovnoj literatury [Optimality Theory: a survey of the principal literature]. Voprosy jazykoznanija. pp.104-121.
Jurgec, Peter. Long-Distance Derived Environment Effects
and Stratal Identity. 31st Generative Lingustics in the Old
World Colloquium. University of Newcastle.
Morén, Bruce. Lule Saami Language Research: What exists
and what is needed? Lulesamisk foreldre- og språkkonferanse. Árran Lule Saami Center.
Rice, Curt. A Momentary Lapse of Reason. 5th Old World Conference in Phonology. Universite de Toulouse le Mirail.
Šurkalović, Dragana. Phases and Prosodic Opacity. Workshop on the Prosodic Hierarchy. University of Tromsø.
Youssef, Islam. “I am derived, therefore I resist” - Diphthongs in Cairene Arabic, The 16th Manchester Phonology Meeting. University of Manchester.
i!"
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"#
Are the Lule Saami words iedne (mother-gen.sg.) and ieddne (mother-nom.sg.) really pronounced the way
the literature and orthography suggest? Linguistics, like all other sciences, requires robust and verified data.
Unfortunately, we often encounter neither. CASTL is dedicated to carefully collecting data and using them to
build empirically supported linguistic theories.
16
Saami Language Documentation and (Re)vitalization
Collecting, Collaborating and Giving
Something Back
In addition to our dedication to theory, CASTL is also
committed to careful and responsible language description. This includes work on Western Europe’s most
endangered language group - found in our own backyard - Saami.
Mávsulasj báhkogirjje - “precious dictionary”
In April of 2008, Bruce Morén-Duolljá was awarded a
grant from the SpareBank Fund (sparebankmidler) for a
Lule Saami spoken dictionary pilot project called Mávsulasj báhkogirjje. The purpose of this project is to develop
a multi-faceted, multi-user, publicly available, online electronic “sound” dictionary of Lule Saami. This will eventually have English, Norwegian, Swedish and German glosses, audio files of each word spoken by speakers of several
dialects, segmented waveforms and spectrograms of
systematically selected token words, and pictures. The
goal is to build a resource that will not only be useful to
linguists of all sorts, but that can also be used by the Lule
Saami community.
Since Lule Saami is a severely endangered language
whose “phonetics, phonology and morpho-phonology
are amongst the most complicated in Europe if not in the
whole world” (Sammallahti 1990: 441) and few linguistic
resources, this project will provide linguists with much
needed and timely data. Because there is currently little
in the way of pedagogical or language reference resources for this language, this work will also help to fulfill part
of our moral obligation to the minority language communities that we collect data from by giving something
back to them. The infrastructure, building, translation and
preliminary orthographic data collection and collation
are underway. The database currently consists of approximately 35,000 entries, and the most important and innovative aspect of the Mávsulasj báhkogirjje pilot project (i.e.
the recording, processing and dissemination of precious
audio material from language consultants) is scheduled
to begin late in the spring of 2009.
Network for Saami Documentation and
(Re)vitalization
In February of 2008, Bruce Morén-Duolljá (CASTL) and
Tove Bull (Humanities Faculty) organized a workshop on
Saami documentation and (re)vitalization. This attracted
over 50 participants from 9 countries and led directly to
a successful NordForsk grant to establish the Network for
Saami Documentation and (Re)vitalization. This grant is
to enhance Saami language research, documentation,
and maintenance and (re) vitalization by keying these directly to one another. The aims are to build a collaborative
network of specialists and speech community members;
develop efficient, coordinated projects; and establish
new methods, tools and protocols for these endangered
languages. This network will benefit researchers and minority language users within the Nordic region and Russia by fostering better understanding among researchers from different fields and traditions, nurturing better
understanding between researchers and speech communities, and creating ways to make the data collected
by linguists immediately available for language support.
Besides developing a web-based archive to ensure that
Saami language research and resources are easily found
and accessible (using LingBuzz as a model), it will also
fund workshops and researcher summer school activities
aimed at improving the knowledge-base of young researchers and giving them unique opportunities to build
collaborative networks of their own. The network currently has 27 groups composed of 101 individuals from
eight countries.
17
The Language Acquisition Group
Exploring Microvariation in the Input
and Extracting Micro-cues from
Micro‑people
Marit Westergaard/Kristine Bentzen
Research projects
The Tromsø Language Acquisition Group explores children’s sensitivity to micro-variation in the input and the
corresponding distinctions in syntax and information
structure in the adult language. So far, our research has
focused on Norwegian, English and Russian. Due to the
focus on variation in adult grammars, our research is
closely linked to current work on syntactic theory.
The overarching research project is VIA (Variation in
the Input in Acquisition). A CASTL-affiliated subproject
of this, VAMOS (Variation and Acquisition: Multiple Object and Subject positions), is funded by a grant from the
Tromsø Research Foundation 2008-2010. The VIA project
investigates children’s acquisition of different types of
word order variation, e.g. the well-known optionality of
verb second (V2) in wh-questions in certain Norwegian
dialects, illustrated in the following example.
Ka trur du? / Ka du trur?
what think you/what you think
‘What do you think?
The project addresses questions such as: What kind of
word order variation are children exposed to and what are
18
the relevant distinctions in the adult language? Do children exhibit any word order preferences in such cases and
what influences their choices (e.g. economy, complexity,
input frequency)? How early and to what extent are children sensitive to prosodic cues and the small nuances in
syntax and information structure that govern adult grammars in cases of word order variation? Is there any indication in children’s behavior that they set major word order
parameters or (over-)generalize in syntax? What can the
study of language acquisition reveal about the nature of
possible variation in the adult language? And how can
knowledge of children’s preferences contribute to our
understanding of historical word order change?
Micro-cues
Our general findings show that children are surprisingly
sensitive to fine distinctions in syntax and information
structure from early on, producing target-consistent
word orders in different contexts, e.g. V2 in declaratives,
non-V2 in exclamatives and both in wh-questions. This
has led to the abandonment of a parameter setting
model of acquisition, common within traditional gene
rative theory. Instead, a new cue-based approach to language acquisition and change has been developed, a
model of micro-cues. The micro-cues are small pieces of
structure formed in children’s I-language grammars on
exposure to relevant triggers in the primary linguistic
data. This model assumes a somewhat reduced genetic
language faculty made up of syntactic primitives and
basic operations, enabling the child to parse the input
and formulate the micro-cues, which must be learned
from input.
The Language Acquisition Group
Photo: Thoralf Fagertun
The TROmsø Language acquisition Lab (TROLL)
We investigate children’s linguistic production both in
spontaneous corpus data and elicited experiments. Data
from child-directed speech are also studied in order to
determine the effect of input frequency. As much of our
research is based on experimental data, we established
a language acquisition lab on campus in 2008, funded
by CASTL and the Department of Language and Linguistics. In the lab we conduct grammar experiments with
children aged 3 to 8. Getting children to produce specific
clause types is quite a challenge, and our experiments are
carefully designed and tested in pilots before the investigation starts. In 2008 we investigated children’s behavior
in subject and object shift constructions.
Other activities
Our research resulted in one PhD dissertation and several publications in 2008. We have also presented talks
both nationally and internationally, e.g. at the Centre for
the Study of Mind and Nature in Oslo (Westergaard), the
International Congress for the Study of Child Language in
Edinburgh (Anderssen), the Formal Descriptions of Slavic
Languages in Moscow (Rodina and Westergaard), the
International Conference for English Historical Linguistics
in Munich (Westergaard), guest lectures in York, Lund,
and Berlin (Westergaard), and an invited presentation
at an international workshop on Frequency and Language Development in Wuppertal (Anderssen, Bentzen,
Rodina and Westergaard). We were also invited to contribute at an interdisciplinary workshop on Dyslexia
and Language in Tromsø. Furthermore, we have written
popularized articles on language acquisition for the
magazines BARN and Labyrint, and there was a report
on our Lab in Labyrint's December issue. Finally, we
have contributed to a national radio program (in particular Kristine Bentzen), and Marit Westergaard gave a
non-specialist talk for a wider audience in connection
with Steven Pinker's visit to Tromsø to be awarded an
honorary doctorate in March.
Selected 2008 Output
Rodina, Yulia. Semantics and Morphology: The Acquisition
of Grammatical Gender in Russian. PhD dissertation.
Westergaard, Marit. Acquisition and Change: On the
Robustness of the Triggering Experience for Word
Order Cues. Lingua.
Westergaard, Marit. Verb Movement and Subject Place
ment in the Acquisition of Word Order: Pragmatics or
Structural Economy? In First Language Acquisition of
Morphology and Syntax: Perspectives across languages
and learners. John Benjamins.
Anderssen, Merete, Kristine Bentzen, Yulia Rodina &
Marit Westergaard. The Acquisition of Subject and
Object Shift in Norwegian: Frequency Issues. Invited
talk, Wuppertal Workshop on Frequency and Language
Development.
19
Postdoc & Researcher Projects in 2008
Luisa Martí
The pieces of indefinites and the nature of
cross-linguistic variation
Indefinites (words corresponding to English some, somebody, anybody, nobody, etc.) in many languages are morphologically complex. Interrogative words (the corresponding word for English what), simple indefinites, or
generic nouns (thing, person, etc.) are building blocks of
complex indefinites in many languages. This project takes
this cross-linguistic tendency seriously and investigates to
what extent the properties of complex indefinites can be
predicted from the properties of the parts these indefinites
are built up from. So far the project has looked at certain
indefinites in Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish and German,
and the result is the indefiniteness hierarchy, a collection
of indefinite semantic properties that aims to be universal.
Part of the work has been devoted to making sure that
the number of properties postulated is maximally small,
with other properties deduced from them. Currently, the
project is focusing on specificity. Looking at specific indefinites in languages like Russian, German or English reveals
that it is possible to isolate linguistically-relevant aspects
of specificity, and with further work it will be possible to
determine how much of specificity needs to be built into
the hierarchy.
Isabelle Roy
My main research interests are situated at the interface between syntax and semantics, and are articulated around
the core issue of understanding how traditional semantic
preoccupations transpose into syntax. Favoring a comparative approach, my work focuses mainly on: (i) predication,
(ii) nouns in their non-argumental uses, including, but not
limited to, the use of nominals as direct predicates, nominals in complex prepositions and (iii) stative predicates and
the typology of states. Another aspect of my research is
concerned with the interface between syntax and lexicon,
and specifically (i) lexical categories (nouns vs. adjectives,
adjectives vs. verbs), (ii) the use of adjectives as nominals
(e.g. the rich), and (iii) nominalizations of adjectives (e.g.
abstract-abstraction).
Gunnar Hrafn Hrafnbjargarson
In my research project, which has been a long-term cooperation with Anna-Lena Wiklund (ArcSyn), Kristine Bentzen
(CASTL), and Þorbjörg Hróarsdóttir (ArcSyn), I have focused
on variation in verb movement and V2 within the Scandinavian languages. The project has resulted in a number
of publications in working papers and peer-reviewed journals as well as presentations at large international confer-
20
ences, such as GLOW and CGSW. The most interesting results of the project include: (i) there are reasons to believe
that Icelandic does not have V-to-I movement independent of V2, (ii) Icelandic does not seem to have generalized embedded V2, as standardly claimed. In this language
all verb movement is V2 movement, but V2 is restricted in
varieties of Icelandic in the same way as in the other Scandinavian languages. The results of a fieldwork done in the
Faroe Islands (August 2008 during the 5th NORMS dialect
workshop) will soon be published in a co-authored paper
with Kristine Bentzen, Piotr Garbacz (Lund University), and
Caroline Heycock (University of Edinburgh). We show that
the verb movement pattern found in Faroese resembles
the pattern found in other Scandinavian varieties, such as
Northern Norwegian and Kronoby Swedish.
Øystein Vangsnes
I have a strong research commitment for the study of grammatical variation across the Nordic language area, and together with Peter Svenonius I coordinate the NORMS project, which in turn relates to a wider joint Nordic effort for
dialect syntax: the ScanDiaSyn project umbrella. My own
current research focuses on the structure of wh-nominals
across North Germanic, an area which previously has not
been subject to detailed investigation and which displays
extensive variation both in terms of the range of wh-expressions used and in terms of the ways in which the various expressions are used. We find for instance expressions
which can lexicalize both which, what-kind-of, and manner-how in one dialect but only the latter two in another,
there are dialects where expressions that literally translates
as what-kind-of can have the meaning of which, and there
are dialects where which and who have the same form. I
have three 2008 publications on the matter and several
additional articles in preparation which relate to the domain of North Germanic wh-nominals.
Minjeong Son
My general research interests lie in the syntax and semantics
of complex predicates (e.g., resultatives, directed motion),
syntactic decomposition of events, and East Asian (Korean/
Japanese) and Austronesian (e.g., Indonesian) linguistics.
In particular, I have worked on various types of complex
predicates in Korean and Indonesian defending the syntactic decomposition of event semantics. In connection with
the Moving Right Along project, I have been conducting
research on spatial and motion expressions in Korean and
languages spoken in Indonesia. I am currently investigating serial verb constructions expressing directed manner
of motion in Indonesian/Malay and Korean in comparison
with other serializing languages (e.g., Tetun Dili, Thai).
PhD Projects in 2008
Monica Bašić
Assuming a rather fine-grained typology of movement
operations, the goal of the project is to investigate interactions between different movement types, address the
question of whether various movement operations enter
into feeding/bleeding relations, and if so, whether there
are restrictions regarding ordering in their application. I
explore whether observed interactions discussed recently
by Williams (2003) and Abels (2007) can be related to the
functional hierarchy, starting from the hypothesis that
there is a close correspondence between the clausal and
nominal functional structure. I further discuss cross-linguistic distribution of wh-scrambling and wh-topicalization constructions and argue that variation in availability
of these constructions across languages can be captured
by assuming that different A'-like movement operations
do not enter into feeding relations, at least in cases where
the same constituent undergoes both movement steps. I
argue that in languages like Japanese and Serbian where
wh-scrambling constructions are licit, not all wh-phrases
need to move to the C domain either overtly or covertly,
and in fact they cannot do so if wh-movement is to be fed
by scrambling. In German-type languages all wh-phrases
must end up in SpecCP. As a result, wh-phrases cannot be
scrambled. I further support these conclusions by relating
the availability of wh-scrambling constructions across languages to the distribution of pair-list and single-pair readings in multiple questions.
number and definiteness on adjectives and closed nominal word classes. The result is a more economic account of
featural distribution where elements that otherwise appear
as polysemic may be shown to hold one invariant meaning
that conveys different interpretations depending on both
extra- and intralinguistic context. From the neo-saussurean
view of Language as a system of values with the conventionalised arbitrary sign as its unit, combinatorial signs, or
syntax, is seen as a device to restrict this arbitrariness. While
in Norwegian, combinatorial signs are mostly encoded by
juxtaposition, the syntactic analyses also resuscitate the
role of intonation as a distinctive grammatical feature in its
nominal system.
Peter Jurgec
Working title: The Nanosyntax of Case
In my dissertation, I apply the Nanosyntactic approach of
Michal Starke to case representation and case assignment.
I investigate the possibility that each case is a collection of
privative features, and that each such feature is a separate
head in the syntactic tree.
The thesis focuses on the nature of phonological representations. Three basic questions are examined. First, what are the
substantive parts of phonological domains (i.e. segments,
morphemes, words, etc.), which are conventionally called
features? Second, how are phonological features organized
(within any domain)? Third, what is the relation between phonological features and their phonetic (articulatory, acoustic,
perceptual) content? So far I have looked into the mechanism of how features spread. The established theories see
feature spreading as a process which can be contained either by a blocking segment (which cannot have the feature)
or by reaching the edge of some larger prosodic or morphological domain. I focus on two previously under-reported
cases of how spreading is stopped. Sometimes, spreading is
limited to one target (non-iterativity). Other times, a segment
can be spread onto, but at the same time blocks any further
spreading (icy targets). I take both patterns as evidence for
the mechanism of feature spreading, and consequently how
features are organized. According to Binary Domains Theory,
which I am currently developing, feature domains are binary,
hierarchical and overlapping. An icy target, for example, can
be a dependent of a feature, but cannot be its head.
Madeleine Halmøy
Björn Lundquist
Working title: The Norwegian Nominal System from a
Neo‑Saussurean Viewpoint
The thesis is devoted to the relation between form, meaning and interpretation in the Norwegian nominal system,
contrasted with English, French and the other Scandinavian languages. One of the major findings is that the truly
bare form of the Norwegian noun is not marked for singular
indefiniteness, as is generally assumed, but rather for general number, i.e. is neutral with regard to both number and
definiteness. This finding has important implications for the
understanding of the rest of the Norwegian nominal inventory, especially what regards the distribution of gender,
Title: Participles and Nominalizations in Swedish (submitted
December 2008)
The dissertation has two major goals: (I) to reach a better
understanding of the "lexical" semantics of different types
of verbs by investigating which properties of the verbs
survive in different types of nominalizations and participles, and (II) to pin down the exact semantic and morphosyntactic properties of different types of nominalizing and
participle-forming morphemes. In classical Tromsø-style, I
have paid equal attention to semantic, morphological and
syntactic detail.
Pavel Caha
21
PhD Projects in 2008
Peter Kinyua Muriungi
Title: Phrasal Movements inside Bantu Verbs. Deriving affix
scope and order in Kîîtharaka (submitted August 2008,
defended February 2009)
The thesis tries to determine the principles that govern affix ordering in Kîîtharaka, an SVO Bantu language spoken in
Kenya. It starts by determining the base hierarchy of affixes
by using semantic scope. Thus, if an affix A scopes over
an affix B, A asymmetrically c-commands B in the phrasal
structure configuration. The thesis then investigates how
the affixes in the base hierarchy are re-ordered to produce
the surface string. It is shown that a constituent containing
the verb root undergoes phrasal movement past an affix
in a mixture of cyclic and roll-up movement. This movement mechanism, which I refer to as dragging movement,
is shown to be strikingly similar to the mechanism that derives the typological variation in the ordering of demonstrative, numeral and adjective in the extended projection
of the noun (Cinque 2005). The thesis therefore shows that
the ordering of the affixes in the extended projection of
the verb phrase in Kîîtharaka and the ordering of modifiers
in the extended projection of the noun phrase fall under
the same generalization.
of the clause structure, between the argumental area (VP)
and the pragmatic area (CP). Schweikert’s prepositional hierarchy for German is illustrated in (1):
(1)Temporal > >Location>Reason>Comitative>Source>
Goal>Instrument>Vehicle >Manner
On the basis of empirical diagnostics, I investigate the hierarchy of postpositions in Japanese and attempt to provide
answers to the following questions:
• Are Japanese postpositional phrases adjuncts or specifiers? Or are they attached directly into the main projection line?
• Are Japanese PPs also hierarchically arranged? If so, do
they conform to Schweikert’s prepositional hierarchy for
German?
• Can we extend Schweikert’s analysis to Japanese PPs?
The PP hierarchy diagnostics adopted in this project are:
1) Focus neutral order of the postpositional phrases,
2) Information Focus, 3) Scope ambiguity and 4) Role disambiguation.
Marina Pantcheva
Islam Youssef
Working title: Decomposing Path
This dissertation is part of the Moving Right Along project and discusses the syntax of spatial expressions. I focus on expression of directed motion and investigate the
fine-grained structure of Goal, Source, and Route paths. I
base my research on cross-linguistic data and show in my
dissertation that different types of paths are of different
complexity and, crucially, are subject to a superset-subset
relationship. Thus, I develop a more detailed syntactic
structure for paths, maximally comprising three distinct
heads. More specifically, I suggest that Goal paths are built
on top of a locative Place head, Source paths are built on
top of Goal paths and therefore contain them, and Route
paths have the most complex structure in that they take as
a complement a Source path.
Working title: Place Assimilations in Arabic: Contrast and
Feature Geometry
A major trend in phonological theory views phonology
as an abstract cognitive system and considers as primary
evidence the system of contrasts, regardless of its phonetic and acoustic correlates (Dresher, Piggot & Rice 1994,
Avery 1996 inter alia). My research provides evidence
from Cairene and Baghdadi Arabic that phonological activity is dependent on the structure of the contrast system of a given language. I investigate place assimilations
in these two dialects of Arabic in the framework of the
Parallel Structures Model of feature geometry (Morén
2003, 2006, 2007). The project covers both primary and
secondary place assimilations, i.e. complete assimilation,
coronal place assimilation, pharyngealization, palatalization, labialization, and monophthongization. By considering their implications for the complete feature analysis of
each language, this work resolves some controversial and
long standing issues regarding these place assimilations.
Furthermore, it brings interesting comparisons and parallels between processes that seem similar, but may be
representationally distinct. Finally, the analysis provides
evidence to support the need for segmental representations in a constraint-based model like Optimality Theory.
Kaori Takamine
Working title: The syntactic structure of postpositional
phrases in Japanese
In this project, I investigate the structure of adjunct postpositional phrases in Japanese. Following Cinque (2003), Schweikert (2006) proposes that adjunct prepositional phrases
are hierarchically ordered and generated in the middle field
22
Study at CASTL [»st√Rij]
Master’s level
Already in the 1990s, two Masters programs were started
by members of the group now working at CASTL, one
in general linguistics and one in English linguistics. These
are two-year programs with substantially overlapping
offerings, taught in English, focusing on theoretical linguistics, especially phonology and syntax. The first year
consists of coursework and the second year is devoted to
a thesis. It is common for second-year students to participate in CASTL research seminars.
Students completing these Master’s programs have
found their way to a number of prestigious PhD programs around the world, including those at the Universities of Utrecht, Leiden, Groningen, Delaware, Michigan,
Connecticut and New York (NYU). And, of course, some
have been admitted to the PhD program at CASTL.
Students interested in applying to the Master’s programs in linguistics at the University of Tromsø should
get in touch with us and we’ll help you get the process
started.
PhD level
CASTL’s PhD program is among a handful of graduate
schools selected by the Board of Directors at the University of Tromsø to focus on developing internationally
competitive programs.
When new PhD students arrive at the CASTL graduate
school, they consult with an advisor to select three seminars or courses to follow already in the first semester. This
results in immediate integration into the CASTL research
teams. During this initial period, students focus on their
work as members of research teams and on writing pa-
pers. In this way, they engage in a rigorous and demanding program. Frequent individual meetings with team
leaders, advisors, and other faculty keep them on track,
moving steadily forward.
A dissertation project emerges from the intensive work
carried out early in the program, and the papers that the
students have written will contribute to the dissertation.
Students in their third and fourth years will set off increasing amounts of time for writing up their research as a unified opus, but nonetheless will continue to be part of the
research team most relevant for their work.
Our PhD program is still young, but the generous
financing from the University of Tromsø for this project
is already showing results in the form of rapid advancement among our doctoral students. They frequently
give presentations – both at student conferences and
at major international conferences. Our students also
publish articles, including some in refereed journals.
In 2007 Kristine Bentzen defended her dissertation
Order and Structure in Embedded Clauses in Northern Norwegian as the first CASTL student to complete the PhD. In
2008 two more students obtained their doctoral degrees,
Sylvia Blaho with the dissertation The syntax of phonology. A radically substance-free approach, and CASTL quota
student Yulia Rodina with the dissertation Semantics and
Morphology: The Acquisition of Grammatical Gender in
Russian. Following in their footsteps, Peter Muriungi and
Björn Lundquist submitted their dissertations in 2008. In
the coming years, more of our students will join the already distinguished collection of doctorates in theoretical linguistics from the University of Tromsø.
23
PhD Dissertations in 2008 [«tIs®`»tHe˘Sn˘` s]
Sylvia Blaho
Title: The Syntax of Phonology. A radically substance-free approach
Supervisors: Curt Rice and Bruce Morén-Duolljá
Topic for the trial lecture: “Syllabic consonants”
Dissertation date: June 6
Committee:
Professor Keren Rice, University of Toronto
Professor Marc van Oostendorp, Meertens Institute and University of
Leiden
Associate Professor Martin Krämer, University of Tromsø
The defence was led by Dean Rolf Gaasland
Photo: Peter Jurgec
My thesis investigates the formal properties of phonological representation and computation. The starting point
of the approach taken is that these can and should be
investigated independently of the effect that extraphonological factors, most notably phonetics, have on the
shape of individual phonologies. The dissertation discusses different formal aspects of phonological representations, and argues for a model using privative indexical
features that can freely enter into feature geometrical dependency relations with one another. These representations are integrated with an Optimality Theoretical model
of computation, and constraint schemas governing featural interactions are discussed. The working of the model is illustrated by three case studies: Slovak sandhi voicing, Hungarian voicing assimilation, and Pasiego Spanish
vowel harmony.
The work was supervised by Curt Rice, with additional supervision by Patrik Bye for the first half, and Bruce
Morén for the finishing stages of the process. Although
not formally connected to the project, extended discussions with Christian Uffmann were an important catalyst
of the ideas developed in my dissertation.
The dissertation committee consisted of Keren Rice
(Toronto), Marc van Oostendorp (Meertens/Leiden) and
Martin Krämer (Tromsø). My defense was preceded by a
one-day workshop on substance-free phonology, with
presentations by Christian Uffmann, Patrik Bye, Peter
Jurgec & Bruce Morén and Dave Odden (Ohio).
24
After finishing my dissertation, I have worked on a
number of projects with Curt Rice, most notably, a paper on variation in substance-free phonology, which has
been presented at a number of venues since, and editing
the book Modelling Ungrammaticality in Optimality Theory,
to appear with Equinox Publishing. We are presenting our
newest findings on this topic at GLOW 32 in April, 2009.
Photo: Peter Jurgec
PhD Dissertations in 2008 [«tIs®`»tHe˘Sn˘` s]
Yulia Rodina
Title: Semantics and Morphology: The Acquisition of Grammatical
Gender in Russian
Supervisors: Tore Nesset and Marit Westergaard
Topic for the trial lecture: “Cognitive and Social Factors Influencing
Language Acquisition”
Dissertation date: April 25
Committee:
Professor Natascha Müller, Bergische Universität Wuppertal
Associate Professor Sergej Avrutin, Utrecht Institute of Linguistics
Professor Curt Rice, University of Tromsø
The defence was led by Dean Rolf Gaasland
Photo: Adnan Icagic
In spring 2008 I defended my doctoral dissertation Semantics and morphology: The acquisition of grammatical gender in Russian. The dissertation has been written
under the supervision of professor Marit Westergaard
and professor Tore Nesset and investigates how Russian
children acquire the category of grammatical gender in
their mother tongue. The focus of the study is on several
specific classes of nouns whose gender is usually derived from their semantic rather than their morphological properties, such as papa ‘daddy’, vrač ‘doctor’, plaksa
‘cry baby’ as well as some short forms of male and female
names like Svetik and Vanya. Previously, such nouns have
been found to be problematic for children acquiring various languages. This dissertation presents the results of
acquisition experiments with 37 Russian-speaking children and provides novel evidence suggesting that between the ages of 2½ and 6 children are rather sensitive
to the noun’s form. Special attention in the dissertation is
paid to the asymmetries in children’s agreement production with various classes of nouns. The detailed analysis of
the experimental results reveals that children distinguish
classes of nouns and that primary linguistic data play an
important role in this process. The dissertation proposes
a cue-based approach to the acquisition of grammatical
gender in Russian that aims to explain the differentiated
use of semantic agreement with various classes of nouns
that emerges from the data. This approach is based
on Westergaard’s (2008) cue-based model and argues
against the semantic hierarchy theory proposed by Corbett (1991). Specifically, given children’s early sensitivity
to fine distinctions in syntax, semantics and morphology,
it is argued that there are separate semantic cues for the
individual noun classes distinguished by children, which
may be seen as formal representations of very specific semantic rules that children apply “locally” to each class of
nouns in particular.
Photo: Adnan Icagic
25
CASTL Related Projects [»p®• a>«dZ
É Eks]
Moving Right Along
Moving Right Along is a project led by Professor Peter
Svenonius, financed under the Norwegian Research
Council’s Yngre Fremragende Forsker program, and administered under the auspices of CASTL. It is a five-year project (2005-2009) with the objective of investigating crosslinguistic expressions of motion and location, focusing on
adpositional systems and their functional equivalents.
NORMS
NORMS (NORdic Centre of Excellence in Microcomparative Syntax) is a network project for the period 2005-2010
administered by Peter Svenonius and Øystein A. Vangsnes. The goal of the project is to map, document, and
analyze the complex patchwork of grammatical variation
throughout the dialects of the Scandinavian language
continuum, from Iceland in the west to the Swedishspeaking areas of Finland in the east, and from the northernmost dialects of Norwegian to the Danish-German
border area in the south. The network consists of seven
partner universities in the Nordic countries, University
of Iceland (Reykjavík), University of Aarhus, University of
Oslo, the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (Trondheim), University of Tromsø, Lund University,
and University of Helsinki. The main joint activity in NORMS proceeds along two
lines. First, the participating researchers in the project are
organized in the following ten form-focused cross-institutional thematic groups: (i) The syntax of noun phrases,
(ii) Verb placement in main and embedded clauses, (iii) The
syntax of the left periphery, (iv) Object Shift, (v) Verb particle constructions, (vi) Argument structure, (vii) Subject
types, (viii) Auxiliaries and modality, (ix) Pragmatic particles, (x) Negation and negative polarity. These groups
organize thematic workshops and meetings at irregular
intervals. Second, every semester NORMS organizes an
excursion to some dialect area where participants from
the various partner institutions come together for a week
to conduct dialectological fieldwork. So far there have
been five such field excursions, to Northern Ostrobothnia (June 2006), the island of Senja, Northern Norway
(October/November 2006), Älvdalen, Sweden (May/June
2007), Western Jutland, Denmark (January 2008), and the
Faroe Islands (August 2008). The sixth excursion will take
place in the border area between Hedmark (Norway) and
Värmland (Sweden) in May 2009. A substantial portion of the NORMS budget has been
reserved for hiring researchers at postdoc level in shortterm positions, and the following scholars have been
26
Photo: Tania Strahan
employed: Gunnar Hrafn Hrafnbjargarson (Tromsø 20062008), Mai Ellin Tungseth (Lund 2006-2008), Maia Andreasson (Århus 2007-2008), Eva Engels (Oslo 2007-2009), Pål
Kristian Eriksen (Helsinki 2007-2009), Tania Strahan (Reykjavik 2007-2009). NORMS is currently filling additional
short-term positions for the remaining two-year period. The results and findings from the project activities are
now starting to emerge. In addition to data presented
and analyzed in individual papers and dissertations, several volumes on specific dialects and dialect areas are
currently being prepared, notably edited anthologies
on Northern Norwegian, Faroese, Övdalian, and Northern Ostrobothnian. Volumes based on thematic workshops are also under way, such as a special issue of Studia
Linguistica on exclamatives. VAMOS
The VAMOS (Variation and Acquisition: Multiple Object
and Subject positions) project is funded by the Tromsø
Reseach Foundation and led by Professor Paula Fikkert
at Radboud University, Nijmegen, who is also employed
part-time at the University of Tromsø from January 2009.
The project started up in October 2008 with Yulia Rodina
and Merete Anderssen as post-doctoral fellows.
The VAMOS project investigates children’s acquisition of
subject and object placement in several constructions in
which two different positions are permitted for these elements. The structures under investigation include subject
CASTL Related Projects [»p®• a>«dZ
É Eks]
Syntactic Architecture (ArcSyn)
The ArcSyn project is led by Thórbjörg Hróarsdóttir. The
project is funded by the Norwegian Research Council
(NFR) for the period February 2005 - December 2010 with
a budget of 6 million NOK. The project forms the Tromsø
Dream Team, consisting of Thorbjörg Hróarsdóttir, Kristine
Bentzen, Gunnar Hrafn Hrafnbjargarson and Anna-Lena
Wiklund. The project is divided into three main parts:
(i) I-Language versus E-Language Change (Hróarsdóttir)
(ii) Scandinavian Verb Movement (Hróarsdóttir & Wiklund)
(iii)mOVe: Movement and OV languages (Hróarsdóttir)
and object shift, verb particle constructions and double
object constructions. Examples are provided in (1) - (4).
(1)Den boka har ikke John/*han lest / that book has not John / he read / Den boka har John/han ikke lest
that book has John/ he not read
(2)John leste ikke den boka/*den / John read not that book / it / John leste *den boka/den ikke
John read that book/it not
(3)John leste ut bok -a /*den / John read out book-the/ it / John leste bok -a /den ut
John read book-the/it out (completed)
(4)John ga Maria en bok / John gave Mary a book / John ga en bok til Maria
John gave a book to Mary
The primary focus of our investigation is Norwegian,
but some of these constructions will be studied in Dutch,
English and Russian as well. The project will also include
a study of the acquisition of double object constructions by Norwegian-Russian bilinguals. The research will
be carried out experimentally in the recently established
TROmsø Language acquisition Lab (TROLL) with children
from the daycare centers and a school close to the University campus.
The Pieces of Indefinites and the Nature of CrossLinguistic Variation
This project is directed by Post Doctoral Fellow Luisa Martí.
The aim of the project is to achieve a better cross-linguistic
understanding of indefiniteness. The project has received
funding from the Research Council of Norway.
NLVN – Nordic Language Variation Network
Nordic Language Variation Network (NLVN) is a cooperative effort of six excellent research groups to investigate
issues of linguistic variation from a partly sociolinguistic
and partly theoretical, generative perspective. In general
there is a certain degree of tension and disagreement between these two schools with respect to both methods
and to fundamental ontological questions, and the primary objective of NLVN is to create a forum for constructive confrontation and discussion between sociolinguists
and grammarians so that a deeper and broader understanding of causes, limitations, and basis for linguistic
variation can be established.
NLVN is funded in 2006–2009 by NordForsk (the Nordic Research Board) under their network scheme for national centers of excellence in the Nordic countries. The
network is administered from CASTL at the University of
Tromsø and by a steering committee of five scholars from
the network.
Participants:
Tromsø: CASTL
Copenhagen: LANCHART
Reykjavík: IceDiaSyn
Lund: GRIMM
Trondheim et al.: UPUS
Bergen: FORSE
27
The Output [»/aÉUt|«pHUt|]
Selections 2008
Publications
Klaus Abels; Peter Muriungi
“The Focus Marker in Kîîtharaka: Syntax
and Semantics”,
Lingua
Laura Alexis Janda
“Motion Verbs and the Development of
Aspect in Russian”,
Scando-Slavica
Monika Bašić
“On Nominal Subextractions in Serbian”,
Balkanistica
Ove Lorentz
“Tonelagsbasis i norsk”,
Maal og Minne
Patrik Bye
“Om jamvekts og vokalbalansens
oppkomst og utvikling i
sentralskandinavisk”,
Norsk lingvistisk tidsskrift
Luisa Martí
”The Semantics of Plural Indefinite Noun
Phrases in Spanish and Portuguese”,
Natural Language Semantics
Tore Nesset
“PATH and MANNER: An ImageSchematic Approach to Russian Verbs of
Motion”,
Scando-Slavica
Madeleine Halmøy
”Number, (In)definiteness and
Norwegian Nouns”,
Proceedings of SuB12
Gunnar H. Hrafnbjargarson; Roberta
D’Allessandro; Susann Fischer
“On Agreement Restrictions”,
Agreement Restrictions, Mouton de
Gruyter.
Thorbjörg Hróarsdóttir
“Types of DPs in OV Order”,
Studia Linguistica
Pavel Iosad
“Teorija optimalnosti: obzor osnovnoj
literatury [Optimality Theory: a survey of
the principal literature]”,
Voprosy jazykoznanija
Marina Pantcheva
“The Place of PLACE in Persian”,
Syntax and Semantics of Spatial P, John
Benjamins.
Gillian C. Ramchand
“Perfectivity as Aspectual Definiteness:
Time and the Event in Russian”,
Lingua
Minjeong Son; Peter Cole
“An Event-Based Account of –kan
Constructions in Standard Indonesian”,
Language
Peter Svenonius
“The Position of Adjectives and other
Phrasal Modifiers in the Decomposition
of DP”, in Adjectives and Adverbs: Syntax,
Semantics, and Discourse, Oxford
University Press.
Peter Svenonius; Gillian C. Ramchand
“Mapping a Parochial Lexicon onto a
Universal Semantics”,
The Limits of Syntactic Variation, John
Benjamins.
Kaori Takamine
“Rare: Two Types of Root Modals in
Japanese”,
The Proceedings of the Ninth Tokyo
Conference on P
Marleen Susanne van de Vate
”I músu fu woóko taánga: Restructuring
in Saamáka”,
Nordlyd
Marit Westergaard
“Acquisition and Change: On the
Robustness of the Triggering Experience
for Word Order Cues”,
Lingua
Anna-Lena Wiklund
“Tense/Mood/Aspect-doubling”,
Syntax and Semantics
Publications 2008
Articles in refereed journals 19
Chapters/articles in books 14
Reviews in refereed journals
4
Books
5
Doctoral dissertations
2
Articles in other journals 20
Total 64
28
The Output [»/aÉUt|«pHUt|]
Selections 2008
Presentations
Monika Bašić; Eugenia Romanova
“Motion Verbs with Inceptive Prefixes in
Serbian and Russian”
Syntactic Structures 2, Moscow
Kristine Bentzen; Klaus Abels
”Is there any Evidence for Punctuated
Paths?”
DGfS, Bamberg
Éva Dékány
“Comitative Adjuncts: Appositives and
Non-Appositives”
MSCL-3, Moscow
Pavel Iosad
“All that Glistens is not Gold: against
Autosegmental Approaches to Initial
Consonant Mutations.”
GLOW 31, Newcastle
Peter Jurgec
“Long-Distance Derived Environment
Effects and Stratal Identity”
GLOW 31, Newcastle
Martin Krämer
“Taking a Free Ride Can Cau[r]se Severe
Hyperrhoticity”
16th Manchester Phonology Meeting,
Manchester
Björn Lundquist; Gillian Ramchand
”Verbs of Contact”
Comparative Germanic Syntax Workshop,
Edinburgh
Luisa Martí; Klaus Abels
”All Split Scope is not Alike”
Sinn und Bedeutung 13, Stuttgart
Michal Starke
“Nanosyntax – How Can I Make You See”,
Words don’t come easy, Verona
Rosmin Mathew
“Restrictions on Clefting in Malayalam”
Cleft 08, Berlin
Dragana Šurkalovič
“Phases and Prosodic Opacity”,
Workshop on the Prosodic Hierarchy,
Tromsø
Bruce Morén
“Lule Sami Sound-based
Documentation: Considering
Researchers’ and Speakers’ Needs.
Saami Documentation and Revitalization
Workshop, Tromsø
Marina Pantcheva
“Assembling Persian Complex
Predicates”
ConSole XVI, Paris
Curt Rice
“A Momentary Lapse of Reason”
5th Old World Conference in Phonology,
Toulouse
Yulia Rodina; Marit Westergaard
“A Cue-Based Approach to the
Acquisition of Grammatical Gender in
Russian”,
Formal Descriptions of Slavic Languages
7.5, Moscow
Minjeong Son
“Cross-Linguistic Variation in
Resultatives: with Reference to Korean
and English”,
2nd International Conference on East
Asian Linguistics, Vancouver
Peter Svenonius
“On the Order of Constituents in the DP”,
Workshop on Universal 20, Cambridge
Kaori Takamine; Naoyuki Yamato
“Object/Event-Denoting Verbal Nouns
in the Light Verb Construction in
Japanese”,
5th Workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics,
London
Tarald Taraldsen
“Colonnata and the Syntax/Lexicon
Interface”,
Workshop on Theoretical Morphology,
Grossbothen
Øystein A. Vangsnes
“On Peripheral Doubling in
Scandinavian”,
Incontro Grammatica Generativa, Padova
Youssef, Islam
“Feature Incompatibility Across Place
Assimilations: Pharyngealization vs.
Palatilization in Cairene Arabic”,
14th Mid-Continental Workshop on
Phonology, Minneapolis.
Presentations 2008
International conferences
& workshops 123
Other presentations 57
Media appearances 14
Total 194
29
Expences
Income
The Numbers [»n√‚ mb®˘` s]
Grant from The Norwegian Research Council of Norway
Financing from The University of Tromsø
Additional grants (from applications)
Other income administrative operational costs
SUM Income
Incoming balance
SUM TOTAL INCOME
Academic staff
Administrative staff
Labor costs
Research assistants
Conferences and workshops
Board meetings
Hiring
Travel
Documentation/info expenses
Guest researchers and guest lecturers
Various expenses
Indirect costs
Operational expenses
SUM Expenses
TOTAL
-4 586 000
-3 136 133
0
-240 000
-7 962 133
-1 156 373
-9 118 506
6 026 847
656 459
6 683 306
31 622
217 275
159 393
45 193
859 385
35 282
234 017
183 068
1 345 500
3 110 735
9 794 041
675 535
All numbers in NOK
Comments
These numbers do not indicate the full scope of the
CASTL budget as they do not include aspects of the
budget formally administered elsewhere in the Faculty
of Humanities. Furthermore, other externally financed
projects for which CASTL is responsible are also exclud-
ed from the numbers above. A list of research activities
which includes projects co-administered by the Faculty of Humanities and CASTL in addition to projects for
which CASTL researchers are exclusively responsible is
given below:
Project
Moving Right Along: Expressions of Motion and Location and the Argument
Structure of Adpositions
CASTL Graduate School – Funding from the University of Tromsø
NORMS – Nordic Centre of Excellence in Microcomparative Syntax – NOS-HS
Nordic Language Variation Network – Nordforsk (NLVN)
The Pieces of Indefinites and the Nature of Cross-Linguistic Variation
Network for Saami Documentation and Revitalization
Linguistic Inquiry
Lule Saami Spoken Dictionary – Funding from Sparebankens gavefond
Sum income CASTL related projects
Project Coordinator Grant 2008
Peter Svenonius
Curt Rice
Peter Svenonius
Curt Rice
Luisa Marti
Curt Rice
240 250
2 458 876
1 757 240
400 000
801 700
300 000
30 018
250 000
6 238 084
All numbers in NOK
30
CASTL Events [/´»vE‚ nts]
Conferences – Workshops – Seminars
Pinker Party
Tromsø, March 28
Photo: Minjeong Son
The University of Tromsø celebrated its 40th anniversary
on March 28th, 2008. This milestone included the awarding of an honorary doctorate to Dr. Steven Pinker of Harvard University. Pinker is best known at CASTL for his work
on language acquisition. His prominence internationally
is based not only on his scientific work, but also on his
“ginormous” success in bringing the fields of psychology
and linguistics to the general public through such books
as The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, and most
recently The Stuff of Thought. This work has made Pinker
one of the most eminent intellectuals of our time.
CASTL and the Department of Psychology had the pleasure of hosting Professor Pinker in Tromsø for two days in
March. In addition to the ceremony, we held a seminar in
which three major research projects in Tromsø were connected to Pinker's previous work. This seminar was attended by approximately 200 researchers and students from
the university. Bruno Laeng presented some of the Tromsø
research on vision as a cognitive system. Marit Westergaard
presented a selection of her work on language acquisition,
and Peter Svenonius offered new insights into the domain
of grammar. Pinker punctuated each talk with a Q&A session with the presenters, teasing out further details of their
work, and highlighting in yet another forum his skills as a
gifted popularizer of scientific work.
Formal Approaches Creole Studies (FACS)
Tromsø, November 14-15
Organizers: Marleen van de Vate (CASTL) and Christian
Uffman (University of Brighton, formerly CASTL post doctoral research fellow)
This conference was aimed at re-establishing the interaction between theoretical and descriptive linguists to
revisit some of the earlier claims made about creoles in
the theoretically oriented literature. Important research
questions targeted by the conference included: the potential contribution that creoles can make to linguistic
theory and the related question of whether creoles are
a unified and/or special group of languages from a structural perspective. The conference programme included
theoretical linguistic papers on creole languages such as
Jamaican, Cape Verdean, Mauritian, Gulf of Guinea, and
even Afrikaans. While large questions cannot be decisively answered in a small workshop, the event was striking
in that most of the phenomena unearthed showed deep
commonalities with phenomena discussed and analysed
in non-creole languages. One was left with the strong
impression that despite the uniqueness of the creole language situation and the similarities across the group, linguistic complexity in creoles was no different nor less rich
than one would expect from any natural language.
Taraldsen Workshop
Tromsø, June 9-10
In 2008, Professor Knut Tarald Taraldsen celebrated his
60th birthday. In honor of the occasion, a workshop was
organized and ten leading linguists were invited to contribute papers in theoretical linguistics, Professors Ian
Roberts (Cambridge), Maria Rita Manzini (Firenze), Adriana Belletti (Siena), Hilda Koopman (UCLA), Dominique
Sportiche (UCLA), Luigi Rizzi (Siena), Edwin Williams (Princeton), Richard S. Kayne (NYU), Anders Holmberg (Newcastle), and Guglielmo Cinque (Venice). The ten invitees
all submitted written versions of their papers, which will
be published as a festschrift by Oxford University Press.
Saami Documentation and Revitalization
Workshop
Tromsø, February 28-29
51 registered participants from nine countries
Coordinated by Bruce Morén-Duolljá (CASTL) and Tove
Bull (Department of Language and Linguistics).
Keynote presentations: Peter Austin (SOAS-HRELP, London),
Michael Riessler (Humboldt University, Berlin), Paul Trilsbeek (MPI for Psycholinguistics), Øystein Vangsnes (University of Tromsø)
31
Many of the world’s languages are rapidly losing speakers. This entails the loss of precious cultural heritage, important linguistic information and an irreplaceable record
of the richness of the human experience. However, considerable effort is currently underway in many regions to
halt language decline and support language revival, and
these are sometimes quite successful. Two key components of language maintenance and revitalization seem
to be 1) extensive documentation and archiving of multifaceted linguistic data that can be used for a range of purposes, and 2) making sure that the language community
plays a central role in language-related projects.
The main purpose of this workshop was to discuss
Saami language documentation and revitalization, to
build a cooperative network of specialists and speech
community members, and to develop concrete proposals for joint projects and funding applications. The workshop was a combination of invited speaker presentations,
group discussions and selected additional presentations - including a screening of the film “Firekeepers” by
Rossella Ragazzi (http://www.nativenetworks.si.edu/Eng/
orange/firekeepers.htm). The workshop led directly to a
3-year NordForsk grant for a project called “Network for
Saami Documentation and (Re)vitalization” coordinated
by Bruce Morén-Duolljá (CASTL).
Bruce Morén-Duolljá, Ove Lorentz, Patrik Bye, and a special
guest appearance by Tomas Riad (Stockholm University)
Spe Beach Party (workshop & jamboree)
Szálka, a picturesque village in the south of Hungary,
August 23-24
There were two main purposes for this workshop. The first
was to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of one of
the most influential books in the field of phonology, the
Sound Pattern of English (Chomsky and Halle 1968). The
secondary was to strengthen ties between CASTL and the
ELTE Theoretical Linguistics Department Eötvös Loránd
University, Budapest. There were 23 participants - including, Sylvia Blaho, Bruce Morén-Duolljá and Curt Rice.
Sylvia Blaho One-Day Seminar
Tromsø, June 5
Speakers: Christian Uffmann, Patrik Bye, Peter Jurgec &
Bruce Morén-Duolljá and Dave Odden (Ohio).
Curt Rice Celebratory Workshop
Tromsø, December 11
The Prosodic Hierarchy PhD Course and
Workshop
Tromsø, September 1-5
Invited lecturers: Junko Ito and Armin Mester (University
of California at Santa Cruz)
Registered participants: 31
This course dealt with the structure of the prosodic hierarchy, focusing on two basic issues:
• Levels of prosody: What kind of differentiation into
genuinely separate prosodic constituents does the
cross-linguistic evidence support? To what extent do
recent developments in syntactic theory (minimalism,
phase theory, etc.) cast new light on the syntax-prosody mapping problem?
• Faithfulness to prosody: Which aspects of prosodic
structure are targeted by faithfulness constraints?
What kinds of shape preservation conditions do we
encounter in prosodic morphology?
The course ended with a workshop, with the following presenters: Dragana Šurkalović, Patrycja Strycharczuk,
32
Speakers: Kirsti Koch Christensen, Christin Kristoffersen,
Ståle Berglund, Peter Svenonius, Kristine Bentzen, Christian Uffman, David Adger, Bruce Morén-Duolljá, Gillian
Ramchand.
The CASTL Colloquium Series 2008
The clan of linguists in Tromsø has a hallowed tradition
of occasional Thursday evening lectures on topics in linguistics, followed by free-ranging discussion. This is an
pportunity for us to hear about new and ongoing reo
search in the field, straight from the people who are performing it. In addition, it is a forum for us to present our
work to colleagues and students. A total of 20 talks were
given in 2008, 13 by invited speakers.
NORMS Workshops
Revisiting Parameters: Holmberg & Platzack
(1995) Reloaded
Lund, October 16-17
Workshop on Subjects and Architecture of Grammar
Trondheim, September 18-19
Organized by Tor A. Åfarli and Mari Nygård
Workshop on Auxiliaries and Modality
Trondheim, September 17-18
Organized by Kristin M. Eide and Guro Busterud
2008 Grand Meeting for Scandinavian Dialect Syntax
Sandbjerg Estate, Sønderborg, Denmark, August 24-28
Dialect Workshop on Faroese
The Faroe Islands, August 8-16
Workshop on Root Phenomena and the Left Periphery
Tromsø, May 19-20
Organized by Kristine Bentzen and Gunnar Hrafn Hrafnbjargarson
Invited speaker: Liliane Haegeman
To celebrate the return of the midnight sun, the NORMS
workshop on Root Phenomena and the Left Periphery
took place in Tromsø, with Liliane Haegeman as our invited
speaker. There were talks on various aspects of root phenomena and the left periphery, ranging from more empirically focused talks on V2 in embedded clauses and lack of
V2 in main clauses, topicalization, and focalization by Ásgrímur Angantýsson, Marit Julien, Hilde Sollid, and Naoyuki
Yamato; doubling by Henrik Rosenkvist and Øystein Vangsnes, and epistemic modality by Kristine Bentzen, Antonio
Fabregas, Gunnar Hrafn Hrafnbjargarson, and Naoyuki
Yamato, to more theoretical talks on the structural make
up and the movement operations occurring in the Left Periphery by Liliane Haegeman and Klaus Abels.
Workshop on Negation
Oslo, March 11-12
Organized by Eva Engels, Janne B. Johannessen, and Arne
Martinus Lindstad
Invited speakers: Liliane Haegeman (Lille), Cecilia Poletto (Padua/Venice), Anne Breitbarth (Cambridge), and
Jóhannes Gísli Jónsson (Iceland)
Workshop on Argument Structure
Lund, February 5-6
Organized by Christer Platzack and Mai Tungseth
Dialect Workshop on Western Jutlandic
Vestjylland: Sevel, Spjald, Harboøre Thorsminde, January 7-11
Organized by Karen Thagaard Hagedorn, Henrik Jørgen
sen, and Sten Vikner
Photo: Maja Sojtaric
Seminar: Typology and Nordic Dialect Variation
Helsinki, June 5-6
Organized by Camilla Wide and Pål Kr. Eriksen
Invited speakers: Östen Dahl, Kristin Eide, and Johan van
der Auwera
NLVN – Nordic Language Variation Network
Workshop "Expletives as Particles"
Helsinki, May 29-30
Organized by Jan-Ola Östman
Invited speakers: Tor A. Åfarli, Kari E. Haugland, and Pål
Kristian Eriksen
3rd NLVN Training Seminar and NORMS Dialect
Workshop
Tórshavn, Faroe Islands, August 8-15
Organized by Höskuldur Thráinsson, Thórhallur Eythórsson, Øystein A. Vangsnes, Jógvan í Lon Jacobsen, and
Victoria Absalonsen
33
Seminar/PhD course "Phonological Variation and
Language Change"
Flåm, June 12-16
Organized by FORSE
CASTL Guests [»kEsts]
CASTL Invited Guests 2008
Adger, David
Queen Mary University of
London
Côté, Marie-Helene
University of Ottawa
Koopman, Hilda
UCLA
Rivera-Castillo, Yolanda
University of Puerto Rico – Rio
Pedras
Alexandre, Nelia
Universidade de Lisboa
Demirdache, Hamida
University of Nantes
Kornfilt, Jaklin
Syracuse University
Rizzi, Luigi
University of Siena
Alleesaib, Muhsina
Universite Paris 8 – ZAS Berlin
Deprez, Viviane
Rutgers/ISC
Legate, Julie Anne
University of Pennsylvania
Roberts, Ian
Cambridge University
Baptista, Marlyse
University of Michigan
Downing, Laura
ZAS, Berlin
Manzini, Rita
University of Florence
Roeper, Tom
University of Massachusettes
Belletti, Adriana
University of Siena
Durrleman, Stephanie
University of Geneva
Nikiema, Emmanuel
University of Toronto
Scobbie, James
Queen Margaret University,
Edinburgh
Bendjaballah, Sabrina
Université François Rabelais,
Tours
Hagemeijer, Tjerk
Universidade de Lisboa
Obata, Miki
University of Michigan
Sportiche, Dominique
UCLA
Besten, Johannes den
University of Amsterdam
Haiden, Martin
Université François Rabelais,
Tours
Odden, David
Ohio State University
Tarantola, Andrea
University of Florence
Bhatt, Parth
University of Toronto
Haïk, Isabelle
Université de Caen
Pinker, Steven
Harvard University
Taylor, Ann
University of York
Borik, Olga
Universidade Nova de Lisboa
Holmberg, Anders
University of Newcastle
Pintzuk, Susan
University of York
Uffmann, Christian
University of Sussex
Braithwaite, Benjamin
University of the West Indies
Kihm, Alain
Centre national de la recherché
scientifique Paris
Pratas, Fernanda
Universidade Nova de Lisboa
Veenstra, Tonjes
ZAS, Berlin
Guest Researchers/Students 2008
Cognola, Federica
Universitá de Padova
06.08.2008 – 09.12.2008
Lahne, Antje
University of Leipzig
09.04.2008 – 28.04.2008
34
Petya Rácz,
Eötvös Loránd University,
Budapest
Serrano, Silvia
Universida Autónoma de Madrid
12.10.2008 – 22.12.2008
Snarska, Anna
Adam Mickiewicz
University, Poznan
12.02.2008 – 12.05.2008
Photo from the NORMS trip to the Faroe Islands for the ”Dialect Workshop on Faroese”. Photo: Tania Strahan
Greetings from CASTL visitors 2008
The highlight of my visit to Tromsø was spending a day
with Curt and Tove Rice [Dahl], chatting about linguistics
and peace studies while photographing fishing villages
and snow-capped mountains.
At CASTL I had the chance to chat and talk to bright, vigorous, committed theoretical linguists who are among the
rare group that have a real understanding of the connection between linguistic theory and language acquisition.
Steven Pinker, Harvard University
Tom Roeper, UMass
You may view Pinker’s pictures of the Tromsø area at http://pinker.wjh.
harvard.edu/photos/Norway/index.htm
At CASTL I participated in a very inspiring meeting for a
great linguist in unforgettable sunny nights, where even
ideas look clearer.
Adriana Belletti, University of Siena – speaker at the Tarald
Taraldsen celebratory workshop.
CASTL is a great scientific environment, pretty much
unique in Europe for linguistic research.
CASTL is a very dynamic research environment in theoretical linguistics. One of the two or three top places in
Europe.
Dominique Sportiche, UCLA
CASTL is one of the most interesting programs anywhere
in Linguistics, with devoted, intelligent and knowledgeable linguists who are very serious about their research
and also very open to discussions.
Jaklin Kornfilt, Syracuse University, NY
Luigi Rizzi, University of Siena
At CASTL they work the way we would all like to work - in
an environment completely dedicated to a cutting-edge
research pursuit - able to support a variety of projects
within it and to involve younger researchers as well as
older and established ones.
The highlight of my stay in Tromsø this time was not
only that we resolved the long-standing question of
phonological voicing in singleton obstruents (they are
voiceless!), we also developed a stunningly better formal
analysis of consonant gradation, and managed to dispose of underlying vowel length to boot.
Rita Manzini, University of Florence.
David Odden, Ohio State University
35
LU N D B LA D ME D IA A S
Head of Administration: Tore B. Bentz (tore.bentz@uit.no)
Higher Executive Officer: Torill Sommerlund (torill.sommerlund@uit.no)
Director: Professor Marit Westergaard (marit.westergaard@uit.no)
Center for Advanced Study in
Theoretical Linguistics
Faculty of Humanities
University of Tromsø
9037 Tromsø
Norway
http://castl.uit.no/

Annual Report 2008

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