Introduction to the Barcelona Conference onSyntax, Semantics, and Phonology
Anna Paradis
University of Oxford
Lorena Castillo-Ros
Centre de Lingüística Teòrica(Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)
This issue brings together a selection of ten papers presented at
the 15th Workshop on Syntax, Semantics, and Phonology (WoSSP),
held at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, on June 28-29, 2018.
WoSSP is a series of on-going workshops organized by PhD students
for students who are working in any domain of generative linguistics,and which offers them a forum to share their work in progress. One ofthe main aims of the WoSSP conference is to provide a space wheregraduate students who wish to present their work may exchange ideas
within different formal approaches to linguistic phenomena.
The conference was initially organized by PhD candidates from Universidad del País Vasco/Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea (UPV/EHU) andUniversitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB). The first conference was heldin 2003 in Vitoria-Gasteiz (Basque Country), and in the beginning only
included works on syntax and semantics (originally WoSS); phonology
was added in 2014. In 2018 the WOSSP steering committee was formedby Maia Duguine (CNRS-IKER), Aritz Irurtzun (CNRS-IKER), ÁngelJ. Gallego (UAB) and Raquel González (Universidad de Castilla laMancha), all of whom were former members and participants of WoSSP.
The conference has been growing year after year; for this fifteenthyear we received an unexpectedly high number of submissions (morethan fifty) of which only 16 talks and 7 poster presentations were accepted. The conference also featured three keynote speakers: Theresa
Biberauer (University of Cambridge), Raquel Sánchez (Universidadde Castilla la Mancha) and Juan Uriagereka (University of Maryland).
We would like to emphasize that WoSSP aims to promote the establishment of bonds among this generation of young linguists, allowing
them to receive valuable feedback from well-known linguists whose
work has made a significant impact on different areas of generativegrammar. With this volume we are delighted to present for the firsttime the proceedings of the 2018 WoSSP conference. It has been a longprocess, but thanks to the efforts of both authors and reviewers theseproceedings will now see the light day.
Linguistic Analysis, 43 1-22022 Linguistic Analysis
P.O. Box 2237, Vashon, WA 98070

4Anna Paradis and Lorena Castillo-Ros

The ten peer-reviewed contributions in this volume are a selectionof papers presented at the conference. They explore a wide-range oftopics in semantics, syntax, and morphology. The authors touch on core
issues related to Case, agreement, binding, clitics, and the left periphery.
The first paper is by one of the invited speakers, Raquel González, who
presented “Negation with Participles and Inhibited Events,” a work she
composed jointly with Antonio Fábregas. González & Fábregas explore
the contrast between Spanish and Lithuanian regarding the impossibilityof introducing a negative operator in a low structural position in contexts
involving participles. In its place, they propose a formal approach following Ramchand’s theory (2018) to explain the asymmetries. The goalof their article is to better understand the nature of low negation in theclausal domain. The authors provide evidence to show that low negation
has a reading of an “inhibited event,ˮ which proves that the externalargument is in a causative relation with a particular event essence. Unlike
Lithuanian, however, in Spanish, the low negative operator is ruled out
between the auxiliary and the participle. The authors propose that thiscontrast is due to the different structural position where participles arebuilt up in both languages: that is, vP in Lithuanian, and above Asp inSpanish. The fact that Spanish participles are insensitive to voice supports this idea. Since the low negative operator is merged in a Polarity
phrase immediately below AspP, this explains why low negation isunavailable in Spanish.
The second contributor is Josep Ausensi who analyses the wayconstruction in “Unaccusativity and the way-construction in English.ˮ
Ausensi shows that, despite being considered a reliable test for unaccusativity (Marantz 1992, Levin 1993, a.o.), the way-construction appears
not only with unergative verbs as expected­—but also includes someunaccusative verbs: i.e., change of state and directed motion verbs. Thus,Ausensi claims that this construction is not sensitive to unaccusativity
and he instead adopts a scalar approach: he shows that unaccusativeverbs encoding a scalar change predicated on the entity denoted bytheir subject are those that are ruled out by the way-construction. Theauthor proposes an approach to the One Scale per Entity Constraint—areformulation of the Unique Path Constraint (Goldberg 1991)­—thataccounts for the fact that these two verbal classes may also appear inthe way-construction.
In “Particles in Basque: A Neo-Performative Approach to ba”, Aitor
Lizardi offers a semantic characterization and a formal approach—builton Wiltchsko’s neo-performative framework (Wiltchsko 2017)—to theBasque particle ba, in which he analyzes it as an outer particle. Lizardi
presents novel data and shows that the ba-particle may appear in paren-

Introduction to the Barcelona Conference on Syntax, Semantics,
5and Phonology
thetical position, with intonation breaks, as well as in both sentence-initialand sentence-final position, although these positions are subject to somerestrictions. The author claims that ba does not have a truth-conditional
meaning but a use-conditional meaning; in particular, he shows that ba
has two uses: a response-marker, which appears in all clause-types except
for imperatives, and command-insistence. Thus, Lizardi analyzes ba as ahead that can be merged in two different syntactic positions: the former
merges with the head of the speaker-oriented ResponseP, while the latter
appears with the head of the Speaker-Oriented GroundP.
Among the several proposals presented in this volume, there are some
contributions devoted to information structure and to the left periphery
which are approached from different angles. In “Sentence Topic Types
in Italian Sign Language” Chiara Calderone offers a detailed descriptionof “aboutnessˮ and scene-setting topics in Italian Sign Language (LIS).
She analyzes the syntactic, pragmatic, and prosodic properties of thesestructures, and thereby enriches the literature on information structure
in sign languages. Calderone’s article sheds light on the communicative
strategies used by signers to manage old information in LIS which isencoded as nominal, pronominal, or null referential expressions. The
novel data collected by the author—involving spontaneous story-tellingand semi-spontaneous monologues—reveal that syntax plays a crucialrole in the prosodic and pragmatic aspects of communication. The results
lead Calderone to conclude that topics are not mandatorily marked andthat combinations of both manual and nonmanual markers are possible. Inparticular, her study shows that, among the nonmanuals mostly involvedin the production of both topic types in LIS, there are raised eyebrowsand squinted eyes; the latter occurs especially for scene-setting topics
of location and “aboutnessˮ topics realized as nominal expressions.
The data collected by the author lead her to prove the assumption that“aboutnessˮ topics are base-generated in the leftward periphery. Herstudy also confirms that LIS follows the syntactic distribution of topic
types identified in both spoken and sign languages and substantiates theproposal by Benincà & Poletto (2004) about the existence of two macrodomains preceding the focus field within the CP layer: frame and theme.
In “Chinese anaphoric resolution and topic chains,” Yi Zheng examines Chinese null and overt pronouns, and inspired by Pu & Pu (2014),
explores the interpretative preference for backward anaphora in Chinese
under the topic chain theory. In particular, the author reanalyzes thestructures discussed in Lust et al. (1996) and Zhao (2014), focusing onsentence initial temporal adverbial clauses with both the absence andpresence of a preposition. The author proposes that there are two typesof topics in Chinese: one is the head of a topic chain presented at the6

Anna Paradis and Lorena Castillo-Ros

discourse-pragmatic tier; and the other is the null operator within theCP domain of each sentence/clause and presented at the syntactic tier.
Yi Zheng claims that the null subject can agree with the topic operator
or be controlled by it via the Generalized Control Rule (Huang 1984);
conversely, an overt pronoun may serve as the head of a topic chain. In
the last part of the article, the author analyzes the asymmetry between
forward and backward anaphora and shows that the interpretative contrast
with overt pronouns is due to the fact that an overt pronoun can inherit
the referential value of a previous topic referent, while an NP cannot.
The left periphery is also explored by Sebastià Salvà in “Si n’eren uns
clítics de subjecte: Evidential Subject Clitics in Old Central Catalan.”Salvà examines the nature of the clitic en in Catalan in particular contexts,
mainly story-telling texts or songs—in which it has been consideredpleonastic by traditional grammarians and is attested in previous stagesof the language (17th-19th centuries). The author provides evidence toprove that these structures cannot be considered instances of clitic doubling; e.g., it may appear with definite DP arguments, which should beexpected to be doubled by a definite clitic, not by a partitive one. Salvà
claims that this special use of the partitive clitic is a case of clitic recycling in which en is used as an evidential subject clitic (SCl) with mixed
properties and which is the overt manifestation of an AgrNum head. The
author notes that in all these structures the clitic is frequently precededby an overt (or null) deictic operator realized as si and ja. Building on
Bartra’s analysis (2011) of the recycling neuter pronouns açò/això inMedieval Catalan and Balearic Catalan, Salvà postulates that the deictic
operator maintains an anaphoric relationship to a previous intervention
in a discourse or even to an implicit context. To understand the natureof the en clitic as an evidential SCl, Salvà offers a cross-linguistic study
by comparing them with SCl in some Northern Italo-Romance varieties(Poletto 2000), such as Borgomanerese (Tortora 2014), as well as theGalician “modal” SCl (Longa, Lorenzo & Rigau, 1996, 1998).
In “Comprehension of Relative Clauses and Binding Principles in
Huntington’s Disease” (HD), Angela Nuzzi explores the syntactic impairment that occurs with object relative clauses and with the application ofprinciple C of the Binding Theory in persons who have been diagnosed
with Huntington’s Disease. Her findings are consistent during the disease progression and in accord with the theoretical assumptions of the
Featural Relativized Minimality and intervention locality. In order tostudy R-expression repetitions in c-comanding and non-c-comanding
configurations, Nuzzi, following Balaban et al. (2016), adopts a disentangling approach by bridging syntactic and psychological perspectives.
Nuzzi analyzes the “Go Lighterˮ discourse principle—i.e., the preferenceIntroduction to the Barcelona Conference on Syntax, Semantics,
7and Phonology
for using pronouns instead of full referential expressions (Balaban et al.
2016: 2-3)—to explain the difficulty in avoiding noun repetitions forpatients experiencing impairment of the Theory of Mind but not syntax.
The author presents the results obtained in an experimental study conducted with Italian-speaking patients who have been diagnosed to be inearly and moderate-advanced stages of HD. In the first part of the study
Nuzzi evaluated the comprehension of different types of relative clauses;in the second part she tested the comprehension of Binding Principles andthe Go Lighter principle. The preliminary results obtained lead Nuzzi toconclude that syntactic difficulties and Theory of Mind could be seen as
potential biomarkers of the disease onset.
Relative clauses are also the object of the article by Adnana Boioc,“Linguistic Interference in a Romanian-Russian Bilingual Context:
Issues in the Grammar of Relative Clauses.” Boioc analyses a languagecontact phenomenon, the use of cine ‘who’ in headed relative clauses—
instead of care as in Standard Romanian—and with plural agreementon the embedded verb when the antecedent is plural, which is attested
in the Lipovan variety of Romanian. The author analyzes novel datacollected in her fieldwork research that was conducted in villages fromthe Dobrudja area, in Tulcea county, located in South-Eastern Romania. Boioc also analyzes Old Romanian data (16th-18th century) from avariety of sources. The analysis of both diachronic and synchronic data
reveal that the Romanian variety spoken by the Lipovan Russians from
Dobrudja presents a feature that was attested in Old Romanian; thisleads the author to formulate the hypothesis that this language contact
phenomenon could not be due to contact with Russian speakers alone
but should be seen as a case of an old feature resurfacing.
The two papers that close this volume delve into the architecture oflanguage. In “Music Also has Prosodic and Syntactic Structure: Structural
Duality as a Reflection of the Formal Design of Language on Music,”
Oriol Quintana explores the parallelisms between language and music.
The author provides a review of the previous literature on the architectureof language and music (Patel 2008, Jackendoff 2009, Katz and Pesetsky
2011, a.o), including Lerdahl and Jackendoff’s (1983) Generative Theoryof Tonal Music. The author extends the duality of patterning, one of themain design features of human language (Hockett 1960), to the humanfaculty of music. In particular, Quintana argues that tonal music is divided into: a) the rhythmic-melodic structure, which follows principles
of weight-balance based on stress periodicity and intonational viability
that creates symmetric structures which are built up from meaninglessunits; thus, it is comparable to the prosodic domain; and b) the tonalharmonic structure, which is formed by meaningful units and follows

8Anna Paradis and Lorena Castillo-Ros

principles of head-complement relations based on categorical projections
that create asymmetric structures. This second domain also permits theunbounded recursive extension of the hierarchical spine of tonal functions; hence, it is comparable to the syntactic domain.
The last contribution is by one of our invited speakers, Juan Uriagereka, who presents “Categories, Features, Interactions: MethodologicalReflections.” The author explores the tension between linguistic formalentities and their interactions. He reflects on the nature of systematicities
observed in languages and how they are systematized. He examines theinteraction between categories, as well as the role and organization offeatures. Throughout his article, Uriagereka advocates the search forthe connections between natural language and algebra. One of the mainquestions analyzed in this article is whether a real property should becharacterized computationally or should be considered conventionallyalgebraic. Or maybe it is a reflection of something else? Uriagereka
also dedicates a part of his contribution to exploring whether there aresome desirable core properties of computation, i.e., finitism, systematicity, productivity, and transparency. All in all, this last paper brings to aconclusion the path explored in this volume: i.e., the improvement of
our understanding of the Faculty of language.
The WoSSP conference would not have been possible without thesupport of the Centre de Lingüística Teòrica (CLT), the Departmentsof Catalan and Spanish Philology of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), and also the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad(FFI2017-87140-C4-1-P), Generalitat de Catalunya (2017SGR-634,
Grup de Lingüística Teòrica).
We would like to thank especially Ángel J. Gallego and the Institució
Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats (ICREA Acadèmia 2015-Gallego). We are also grateful to all the members of the scientific committeeand we would like to thank the rest of the members of the organizing
committee (Rut Benito, Rosa Bono, Antonio Cañas, Irene Fernández,
Samanta Planells and Silvia Serret) and all the PhD students of the CLTUAB for their considerable help. Finally, the editors of this volume would
like to acknowledge the work and patience of all authors as well as thehelp of the reviewers for making this publication possible. We hope you
enjoy reading it as much as we did putting it together.

Introduction to the Barcelona Conference on Syntax, Semantics,
9and Phonology
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