The Research Group in Syntax & Morphology (Research Programme in Language Sciences; School of Communication & Culture; Aarhus University)

is pleased to announce two guest lectures:

Laura Bailey (Univ. of Kent)

https://linguistlaura.wordpress.com/ & https://www.kent.ac.uk/cultures-languages/people/1707/bailey-laura,

1. The syntactic and semantic properties of because-X, because why not?

Wednesday, December 11, 2024, from 13:15 to 14:45, room 1481-324

2.  Preposition omission in English, or why you can’t walk the museum

Thursday, December 12, 2024, from 13:15 to 14:45, room 1481-324

1. The syntactic and semantic properties of because-X, because why not?

(Based on work co-authored with Christina S. Kim and Eleanor Cook)

We will take a look at the rapidly-evolving and relatively new phenomenon known as because X, as in I have to collect data because science. We present data from an exploratory survey, a Twitter corpus, and a large-scale acceptability rating and fill-in-the-blank study, and we will demonstrate that because X is sensitive to syntactic category (interjections and bare nouns are favoured, while prepositional phrases and verbs are rarely permitted), and that there is an effect of internet usage and variety of English. Furthermore, because X is not elliptical, as is often suggested. Based on these studies, we show that there are two subtypes of because-X, one with a deictic function indicating a state of affairs, and one with an expressive function conveying an emotional state. Both rely heavily on the addressee's contextual knowledge or salient properties of X, leading to a high degree of flexibility of the interpretation of X and restricted contexts of use in terms of audience (in-groups) and register (informal, especially online communities).

2. Preposition omission in English, or why you can’t walk the museum

Preposition-dropping, or omission of the preposition to in phrases such as I’m going shops, is common in varieties of English. In this talk, I present the results of a study on this phenomenon in Southeast England, and show that it is restricted to a) familiar nouns; b) the verbs come and go; c) the preposition to; d) a directional Goal argument; e) bare nouns. In other words, I’m going shops is fine but *I’m walking the museum is not. Interestingly, this set of restrictions exactly parallels that of (standard) Greek, and overlaps with the restrictions on different German varieties, but differs in some significant ways from some other varieties of English (Myler 2013, Biggs 2015). We’ll explore these differences and why the Englishes are not more similar to each other than to other languages, offering an analysis based on the decomposition of the prepositional phrase. I conclude by introducing current work on bare noun objects, as in I’m gonna get job, and suggest some links between the two constructions.