A paper co-authored by our colleague Elise Newman and alum Kenyan Branan (PhD 2018) of the University of Göttingen has just been published in Syntactic Theory & Research (otherwise known as STAR).  Entitled “Paths: the ghosts of features past”, here is the abstract, and here is the link to the paper: https://sites.google.com/view/kbranan/home

We discuss a set of cases where an adjunct or specifier is neither uniformly opaque nor uniformly transparent for long distance dependencies but rather its transparency is sensitive to other properties of its local context besides adjuncthood/specifierhood. These cases pose a problem for classic analyses of the Condition on Extraction Domains, as non-complements are usually taken uniformly to be islands for extraction. To describe the variable transparency effects observed, we first suggest that each exception to the Condition on Extraction Domains occurs in a multiple specifier environment, like that proposed by Jonathan Nissenbaum (2000, doctoral thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology) for parasitic gap constructions. We furthermore propose a theory of locality that makes fine-grained predictions about what phrases are accessible for operations external to them. The proposal features a path-based view of locality in dependency formation, where projection of a feature from the goal to the probe’s sister is necessary for a dependency to be well-formed. On our view, the feature projection algorithm allows goals to project their features only when their sisters have certain properties, predicting that complements and second specifiers but not first specifiers are transparent for long distance dependencies.

Congratulations Elise and Kenyan!

News has reached us that our distinguished alum Despina Oikonomou, currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philology at the University of Crete,  has been awarded tenure.  Great news, Despina, and congratulations!!