Special Lectures on Linguistics
Date: August 9th (Thur), 2018
Lecture One: 16:00 Yohei Oseki (Waseda University & RIKEN)“Roots don't project”
Lecture Two: 17:00 –Kazuko Yatsushiro (Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft/
ZAS & Osaka University)“The effect of Intonation Contour on Scope: Evidence fromChild Acquisition”
Lecture Three: 18:15 Uli Sauerland (ZAS (Berlin) & Osaka University)“The Thought Uniqueness Hypothesis”
Venue: Room 307, Faculty of Media & Communication,
Hokkaido University (N17 W8 Kita-ku, Sapporo)
Organized/Sponsored by Satoshi Oku Office Hokkaido Univ.
and English Literature Society of Japan, Hokkaido Branch(＊Admission Free＊)Contact: satoshio@imc.hokudai.ac.jp (奥聡)Yohei Oseki (大関洋平): Roots don't project
One of the recent debates in Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz, 1993) is whether or notroots can take XPs as complements and project √P (Harley, 2014; Alexiadou, 2014). In this talk,I will argue that the answer to this question is negative; namely, roots don’t project. Specifically,I discuss two empirical domains, root suppletion in Ainu and transitivity alternation inJapanese, and show that internal arguments should be severed from lexical roots, but rather
introduced by functional heads. These results strongly suggest that roots store less argument
structure information than previously conceived, contradicting lexicalist approaches tomorphology, and also corroborate Chomsky’s (2013) conjecture that roots cannot provide labels.

Kazuko Yatsushiro (八代和子): The effect of Intonation Contour
on Scope: Evidence from Child Acquisition
Jacobs (1984), following Jackendoff (1972), observes that a universal quantifier in subject
position interacts scopally with negation in a sentence like (1) with a neutral intonation contour,and as a result, the sentence is compatible with both scope interpretations, whereas with aspecial intonation (Hat contour), only the inverse scope is available.
(1) Alle Politiker sind nicht korrupt ‘All politicians are not corrupt
We have tested 3- to 6-year old children’s scope interpretations with two types of intonation
contours. The result shows that children’s interpretations resemble that of adults’. Specificallychildren correctly prefer inverse scope in all-not items with hat-contour, but still prefer linear
scope with two-Q items. Our data show that children are surprisingly sensitive to hat
intonation, even though for other types of intonation children’s knowledge of their effect has
been difficult to establish. We conclude that children fully know the semantics and pragmatics
underlying the interaction of scope and hat intonation.

Uli Sauerland: The Thought Uniqueness Hypothesis
The Thought Uniqueness Hypothesis (TUH) I propose states that each proposition has only aunique "best" conceptual representation within a certain search space. The TUH derives theeffects of binding economy, scope economy (Fox 2000, MIT Press), and the inflexible types
hypothesis (Heim 2017, unpublished; Hirsch 2017, MIT Dissertation), but in several cases goesbeyond these. The TUH has a broad implication for the structure of grammar: an abstract
conceptual representation is generated to serve simultaneously as the input to interpretationand morpho-phonological realization. Finally, the TUH can be unified with current work informal pragmatics (e.g. Meyer 2013, MIT Diss.)