LASER Kickoff Workshop

***Note that the workshop will take place on two non-consecutive days, Saturday, December 4th and Monday, December 6th.***

Meeting Description:

The LASER project will feature a two-day kickoff workshop to introduce the project and to encourage discussion of different syntactic treatments of selective opacity effects in the Minimalist framework. The workshop will involve presentations by project team-members and invited speakers specialising in issues of locality and selective opacity. It will be fully virtual, and participation is open to all, following a (free) registration.Invited Speakers:

• Jessica Coon (McGill) & Stefan Keine (UCLA)
• Claire Halpert (Minnesota)
• David Pesetsky (MIT)
• Michelle Sheehan (Newcastle)
• Coppe van Urk (Quenn Mary, University of London)

LASER (Locality and the argument/adjunct distinction: Structure-building vs. structure-enrichment, jointly funded by AHRC and DFG) seeks to investigate and derive cases of selective opacity, i.e. systematic variation in locality constraints on different types of syntactic dependencies, such as movement, control, and agreement. We are especially interested in how various A- and A'-dependencies interact with the argument/adjunct distinction. Among other things, we are exploring a novel path-based approach to locality which makes a crucial distinction between structure-building and structure-enrichment. The LASER project team consists of Elise Newman & Rob Truswell (Edinburgh), Sandhya Sundaresan & Hedde Zeijlstra (Göttingen), and Kenyon Branan & Thomas McFadden (ZAS, Berlin).

Workshop registration: https://forms.gle/Y9BtwvJsyukPZseq5
Workshop website: https://www.sndrsn.org/laser-kickoff-workshop