Follow up on our discussion of the (non-)existence of the past tense stem morphome in Lithuanian.  The possibility arose that the vowel-changed stem might be a sort of participle, on the intuition that, historically (in Indo-European at least), past tense might arise from a perfect participle.  From there, it was just a short step to asking about the connection between the Latin t-stem, a perfect participle in its most prominent use, and the Lithuanian putative past stem.  I remarked that, as in Lithuanian, I thought the Latin t-stem was used for a repetitive verb formation.  For someone who can't remember any of your names on demand, my memory for facts and analyses form the linguistic literature has proven remarkable.  Here's a table from Aronoff of the uses of the Latin t-stem: I also think the connection between the theme vowels in Latin, as in Erik's analysis, and the Lithuanian augments is intriguing.

 FRIDAY SEMINARS I'm doing a seminar here in Geneva on Fridays about my Syntax Beyond Merge work, which is progressing nicely.  If you're interested, the info is in the ReadMe file on the following GoogleDrive folder: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1-s0JUiOyDQgqwp_YE2UmuiLYHAaA8fOv?usp=sharing You'll find PowerPoint presentations, links to the recordings of (most) of the sessions, plus info about the Zoom link for participating. --Alec

 Zoom Intelligence has summarized our meeting! Meeting assets for NorthEastCorridor Morphology are ready! Meeting summary  Quick recap The group explored various aspects of English syntax and phonology, including Scots dialect variations, modal verbs, and the complexities of prepositions in French. They discussed morphological and syntactic differences between past and present tenses in different languages, particularly focusing on Georgian and the role of modals in syntax. The conversation ended with discussions about semantic head movement, modal scope, and the challenges of categorizing verbs and their forms within a syntactic framework, with plans to meet again in December. Next steps Alec: let everyone know about the last meeting of the semester in December Alec: discuss the best ways to use this group in thinking about what to do in the spring Alec: discuss whether to change some of the ways they're doing things for next semester Summary Scots Accents and Syntax Projecti...

After today's discussion of possession, I wanted to write down a short (I hope) puzzle that I have been thinking about in connection with have -possession in English. To keep it short, I'll mostly avoid fleshing out all the implications and just treat it as a series of puzzles, which I think are relevant to a lot of what we have talked about. (Now that I finished, I see that it would probably exceed the word limit for Snippets ...)  The starting observation is that (1) and (2) are basically equivalent.  (1) She has a lot of money. (2) She has got a lot of money.  In my (American) English, got is very different from gotten , so (2) cannot be eventive/inchoative. It is strictly possessive. In (1), have  normally cannot undergo subject-aux inversion (nursery rhymes aside); see (3). But in (2), it can; see (4).  (3) *Has she a lot of money? / Does she have a lot of money.  (4) Has she got a lot of money?  So let's call this puzzle 1 : (2) has auxiliary hav...

 On Syntactic Features In discussions of the morphophonological mapping from syntax to phonology, we aim to establish generalizations based on the features of morphemes in the syntax.  But the featural content of morphemes in the syntax is often undertheorized by syntacticians, who are often motivated by a desire to keep the syntax somehow transparent to semantic interpretation.  What sorts of features should morphemes carry in the syntax? Syntactically relevant features?  What does the syntax actually accomplish with the features? Features related to agreement and case marking:  “Unvalued” or “valued” person, number, and gender features.  Unvalued or valued case features? Features related to syntactic selection?  Here we can separate proposals into two categories.  First, we have EPP or Merge features, i.e., features that ask for Merger, often requiring Merger of a phrase with a categorical (+DP) or “criterial” ...

 No Meetings for Two Weeks: Alec forgot that he had arranged to take part in a medical study (don't worry -- I qualified on the basis of age, not on the basis of an ongoing condition) that requires brain scans on successive Wednesdays during our meeting time. Please continue to post in the Blog and think about the best use of our next session!

I've never posted a proper "blog entry" of this kind before, but I thought I would try at least as a way to get some thoughts down while they are still fresh in my mind. As some of you know, I gave a talk on allosemy at NELS on Friday. Some of you raised some really interesting questions, during the Q&A and later. I'll put the handout in the dropbox folder in case anyone wants to have a look.  Yesterday, two days after my talk at NELS, someone asked me a very interesting and hard question that relates to some of the things we have been discussing in this group. It's something I have thought about many times before, but I think that the range of approaches we might consider could be different now. The question was what to do about cases where an overt verbalizing or nominalizing affix seems to affect root allosemy. These kinds of cases are fairly well-known, and have been discussed by Dave Embick, Hagit Borer, etc.. These are things like cover vs. coverage , fo...