omer.lingsite.org Open in urlscan Pro
160.72.112.228  Public Scan

Form analysis
0 forms found in the DOM

Text Content

OMER PREMINGER


 * Home
 * Research
 * Talks+Handouts
 * Papers, etc.
 *  Teaching+Advising
   * Courses
   * Past Advisees
 * CV
 * Contact
 * Updates
 * Blog

HomeResearchTalks+HandoutsPapers, etc. Teaching+Advising — Courses— Past
AdviseesCVContactUpdatesBlog

 

PLEASE NOTE: As of May 2022, this site will no longer be regularly maintained
or updated – other than, potentially, the occasional “Ills of academic
linguistics” blog post. For everything else, I can be found
at: https://preminger.xyz/

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I’m a linguist.

My research interests span the linguistic sub-fields traditionally identified
as syntax and morphology.

I work on phenomena that resist explanation in terms of form and/or meaning.
(If you are unfamiliar with linguistics, the very idea that such phenomena exist
might strike you as a little bit counter-intuitive. But phenomena of this sort
are surprisingly common in natural language!)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Here’s some stuff I have been thinking about lately…





A NON-SEMIOTIC APPROACH TO LANGUAGE



I have been thinking a lot lately about the nature of the atoms of linguistic
computation. Traditional lexicalist notions (like ‘word’, or even ‘morpheme’)
have proven inadequate for capturing the relation between syntax and
morphophonology: it turns out that syntactic terminals need not align with
‘words’ nor even with morphological exponents. Hence the need for more
sophisticated approaches to the syntax-morphophonology mapping,
such as Distributed Morphology or Nanosyntax. While it is less often remarked
upon, lexicalist notions are every bit as inadequate when it comes to the
relation between syntax and semantics. Listed (so‑called ‘lexical’) meanings
do not align with syntactic terminals, either. And you can forget about aligning
listed meanings with ‘words’ or with morphological exponents.

The solution I propose is to reject once and for all the semiotic underpinnings
upon which linguistic theory has traditionally been built. Plainly put,
syntactic atoms are neither pronounced nor interpreted. Syntactic atoms
certainly form the basis for the mapping to morphophonology, but that mapping is
far from transparent. They also form the basis for the mapping to semantics, but
that mapping is also far from transparent. Most importantly, the two mappings
are not always idiosyncratic in the same ways, or even in the same places.

The idea that “morphemes have meanings” and/or “meanings have spellouts” is thus
a misapprehension. It is on a par with a claim like “the form of the English
past-tense is fully regular”: it might be true for a large tract of cases, but
it is categorically false as it regards the design of the underlying system.
(And the degree to which it successfully approximates the truth is likely an
artifact of learning pressures, in both cases.) In reality, morphemes are
spellouts of pieces of syntactic structure, and listed meanings are
interpretations of pieces of syntactic structure. Sometimes, those pieces even
align! But that is, at best, a tendency. And we shouldn’t let it mislead us
about the nature of the underlying system.

Frameworks like Distributed Morphology and Nanosyntax are still,
at a fundamental level, built on the preconception of form-syntax-meaning
alignment (i.e., semiosis), augmented with the technical wherewithal to capture
deviations from this alignment where they arise. It is time, I would argue,
to move beyond this preconception, and to embrace the non-semiotic nature of
natural language. Thus, we need a grammatical framework that is non-semiotic
to its very core. I’ve been developing one.





MODULARITY, AND THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SYNTAX AND SEMANTICS



I am also very interested in issues of grammatical modularity. Specifically,
I have come to believe that much of what passes for “syntax” these days is
really semantics, masquerading as syntax. Or, if you prefer: semantics,
obliquely described using the vocabulary of syntactic theory. The idea of
a transparent, reliable mapping between syntax and semantics is an indispensable
methodological heuristic. But in much of the current work in syntax and
semantics, this methodological heuristic has been elevated, often implicitly,
to the status of bona fide grammatical principle. Is this category change
justified? I would argue not. (See here and here.) Not only that, it is
counterproductive to research both in syntax and in semantics. (See here.)

As syntacticians, we can and should aim to do more than redescribing meaning
using syntactic tools. Agreement and case represent two of the clearest
yardsticks against which we can measure this. That’s because agreement and case
are hierarchy-sensitive phenomena that, nevertheless, cannot be reduced
to interpretation. Thus, they provide an ideal window into that which is
quintessentially syntactic. If your theory gets the meaning right, but not
agreement and case, then what you have on your hands is a theory of semantics,
not a theory of syntax.





SOME OTHER TOPICS I AM WORKING ON OR HAVE WORKED ON:



 * finite agreement
 * nominal case
 * the Person Case Constraint (PCC)
 * clitic doubling
 * head movement
 * ergativity

I work on various (and often unrelated) languages, including: Basque, Kaqchikel,
Icelandic, English, Hebrew, Sakha, Q’anjob’al, Kinyarwanda, Shi, Oromo,
and Georgian.

See my research page for further details.







RECENT UPDATES

Slides for “Natural language without semiosis” (posted: Feb 26, 2022)

Fall 2021: more upcoming talks (posted: Oct 4, 2021)

Sigwan Thivierge defends! (posted: Jul 19, 2021)

New paper: “A re-evaluation of Arad’s argument for roots” (w/Ezer Rasin & David
Pesetsky) (posted: Jul 10, 2021)

Rodrigo Ranero defends! (posted: Jul 8, 2021)

Three talks in September (posted: Jun 6, 2021)

Talk at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen Ling Colloquium (posted:
Apr 27, 2021)

A “vignette” on phi-agreement in syntax (posted: Apr 17, 2021)

Two presentations at WCCFL 39 (posted: Mar 17, 2021)

Paulina Lyskawa defends! (posted: Jan 15, 2021)

New paper: “Taxonomies of case and ontologies of case” (posted: Sep 23, 2020)

Talk at the TAU Linguistics Colloquium (posted: Sep 19, 2020)

Suyoung Bae defends! (posted: Jul 3, 2020)

Published in Glossa: “Functional structure in the noun phrase: revisiting Hebrew
nominals” (posted: Jul 2, 2020)

Talk in Oslo (posted: Sep 19, 2019)

Published in Glossa: “The Agreement Theta Generalization” (posted: Aug 29, 2019)

New version of paper “The Anaphor Agreement Effect: further evidence against
binding-as-agreement” (posted: Jul 24, 2019)

Handout for talk at Thirty million theories of features workshop (posted:
May 28, 2019)


RECENT BLOGPOSTS

blogpost: The ills of academic linguistics, part 2: “The grantification
of everything” (posted: Jun 21, 2022)

blogpost: The ills of academic linguistics: outlook (posted: May 23, 2022)

blogpost: The ills of academic linguistics, part 1: “No syntax for you!”
(posted: May 19, 2022)

blogpost: Norbert Hornstein – an appreciation (posted: May 12, 2022)

blogpost: Some personal news (posted: Mar 24, 2022)

blogpost: The shortest argument you’ve ever seen in favor of Late Insertion
(posted: Dec 17, 2021)

blogpost: How minimalism hijacked modularity (posted: Nov 23, 2021)

blogpost: Idioms with movement (posted: Nov 14, 2021)

blogpost: Some thoughts on the recent kerfuffle over on linguistics twitter
(posted: Oct 28, 2021)

blogpost: We could all use some terminological hygiene (posted: Oct 27, 2021)

blogpost: There is no “meaning-first” alternative (posted: May 24, 2021)

blogpost: Are individual syntactic terminals ever interpreted? (posted: Mar 11,
2021)

blogpost: Noam Chomsky and Benjamin Lee Whorf walk into a bar… (posted: Dec 26,
2020)

blogpost: “Ecological validity” (posted: Oct 28, 2020)

blogpost: Signal-boosting a few things (posted: Jul 25, 2020)

blogpost: Architecture and Blocking revisited (posted: Jun 18, 2020)

blogpost: On so-called “degrees of grammaticality” (posted: Apr 26, 2020)

blogpost: On the “interleaving” of morphology & syntax (posted: Apr 18, 2020)

blogpost: Post-minimalism? (posted: Feb 16, 2020)

blogpost: blogroll? blogroll! (posted: Jan 1, 2020)

blogpost: What is and isn’t evidence for a phase (posted: Dec 25, 2019)

blogpost: Two problems with the LSA (posted: Dec 18, 2019)

blogpost: Meaning contrasts: generated or parasitic? (posted: Oct 20, 2019)

© Omer Preminger Suffusion theme by Sayontan Sinha