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SUMMARY:Structure and linearisation in disharmonic word orders - Dr Theres
 a Biberauer and Professor Ian Roberts (Linguistics Dept)
DTSTART:20070130T180000Z
DTEND:20070130T193000Z
UID:TALK6329@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Dr Theresa Biberauer
DESCRIPTION:*Structure and linearisation in disharmonic word orders*\n\nTh
 e "disharmonic word orders" of the title refer to word orders that aren't 
 consistently head-initial or head-final\, i.e. those showing "mixed" heade
 dness. Both generative and typological accounts lead one to expect\nthat o
 rders of this kind should be  infrequent/unstable/disfavoured\, but they a
 re in fact more common than the so-called "harmonic" word orders (cf. Drye
 r 1992). All disharmonic orders do not appear to be equally commonly attes
 ted\, however\, with certain mixed orders (those involving a head-initial 
 phrase immediately dominated by a head-final one) consistently\nfailing to
  surface in languages that otherwise license both harmonic and disharmonic
  word orders.\n\nThe goal of this talk is to formulate and motivate a gene
 ralisation about disharmonic/mixed systems which we hope will have univers
 al validity for word-order typology. Our contention is that recent ideas i
 n minimalist theorising (cf. Chomsky 2005) pave the way towards an underst
 anding of the above-mentioned skewing and also of its apparent exceptions.
  In particular\,\nwe hope to show that the featural make-up of syntactic c
 ategories\, the manner in which syntactic structures are constructed (cycl
 icity) and the manner in which these are then linearised interact to exclu
 de precisely the structures we do not see\, while accounting for those tha
 t we do.\n\n[NOTE: This is joint work with Anders Holmberg of the Universi
 ty of Newcastle Upon Tyne.]
LOCATION:G-R04\, English Faculty
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