WA Distinguished Professors' Lectures Series features internationally renowned scholars visiting the Faculty of English to share their research and professional expertise with the faculty and students. The Faculty of English welcomes everyone to a lecture From syntax to the structure of thought by Prof. Michal Starke from Masaryk University. The lecture will take place on March 28 (Thursday), 2019, at 6:30 p.m. in room 109A, Collegium Novum.
Thursday, March 28, 6:30 p.m.
109A Collegium Novum
I will argue that syntactic research of the last couple of decades completely changes our view of the architecture of language, parts of philosophy of mind, the relationship of language to non-language faculties, our understanding of the relationship of language to thought, etc. Much of what we considered to be language for instance turns out to be language-independent - what we might call 'language-free syntax' - and much of what was thought to be purely arbitrary syntactic constraints turns out to be partially grounded in interpretable (semantic) concepts. Syntactic structures have traditionally been overwhelmingly about verbs and their arguments and modifiers, with just a little bit of 'stuff' (e.g. S/S') added -- reflecting the view that "the core of syntax" is about the behavior of verbs and their arguments and modifiers. As syntactic inquiry become more sophisticated and fine-grained, that little bit of 'stuff' grew into a large number of functional projections capturing the differing syntax of definite vs. indefinite nouns in a number of languages, tensed versus untensed verbs, completion adverbs versus frequentative adverbs, the interaction of floating quantifiers and passive auxiliaries, etc. It is the evolution of that little bit of 'stuff' that has fundamental implications with respect to our understanding of language and mind.
Research-wise, the bigger inflection points have been his work on the tripartition of clitics, together with Anna Cardinaletti, then the work on remerge (now called internal merge) and weak islands (a feature-based upgrade to Relativised Minimality, which has now become the standard version of Relativised Minimality), followed by the move to Nanosyntax. He is now in the process of exploring what you might call "nanosemantics", i.e. the consequences of Nanosyntax on the meaning side of language.
On the organisational side, Michal Starke has founded the Eastern European Generative Grammar (known as the EGG) in 1992, which has been going on continuously for 27 years now (he has actively organized it for more than 20 years and passed it on to others in 2015). He has also created LingBuzz (in 2004), which has become the de facto standard place for articles in "generative" linguistics and beyond - and he actively maintains it to this day. Finally, he has recently become the editor of RGG (the Rivista di Grammatica Generativa, renamed "Research in Generative Grammar"), one of the earliest and most venerable journals in the field, with the twin goal to revive it and also explore the future of publishing in this rapidly changing time for academic knowledge dissemination.
