Syntactic Theory at Boğaziçi University

ST@BU is a syntax reading group that meets bi-weekly. The primary goal of the reading group is to establish an informal but guided academic platform that fosters advanced research and collaboration in syntactic theory.

The meetings are organized by Ümit Atlamaz and Ömer Demirok and supported by Metin Bağrıaçık, Sumru Özsoy, and Balkız Öztürk. Anyone intersted is welcome (grad, undregrad, anyone).

Themes and topics are determined annually. This year's theme is Case & Agreement. If you would like to present a paper or suggest papers that are not on the reading list, please contact the organizers.

*Occasionally, ST@BU meetings will clash with Department or Faculty meetings. Some of these meetings are announced in the last minute. On such occasions, we will postpone the meetings to the following week and announce it at the earliest convenience.

  • Meeting Time*

  • Thursday 3pm

  • or

  • Thursday 5pm



  • Zoom Link

Schedule

Date Discussion Lead Paper Handout
November 18, 5pm Ümit Atlamaz Jean-Roger Vergnaud. 2008. Letter to Noam Chomsky and Howard Lasnik on ”Filters and Control.” Handout
December 2, 5pm Ömer Demirok Alec Marantz. 1991. Case and Licensing. Handout
December 23, 5pm Ümit Atlamaz, Ömer Demirok, Metin Bağrıaçık From Split-Ergativity Towards Accusativity in Heritage Kurmanji and Georgian. Handout

Reading List (alphabetically ordered)

Faruk Akkuş. 2020. On Iranian case and agreement. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 38 (3): 671–727

Mark C. Baker. 2013. Agreement and Case. Chap. 17 in The Cambridge handbook of generative syntax, ed. Marcel Den Dikken, 607–654. Cambridge University Press

Mark C. Baker and Nadya Vinokurova. 2010. Two modalities of case assignment: Case in Sakha. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 28 (3): 593–642

Susana Béjar and Milan Rezac. 2009. Cyclic agree. Linguistic Inquiry 40 (1): 35–73

Rajesh Bhatt and Martin Walkow. 2013. Locating agreement in grammar: An argument from agreement in conjunctions. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 31 (4): 951–1013

Maria Bittner and Ken Hale. 1996. The structural determination of case and agreement. Linguistic inquiry: 1–68

Bronwyn Bjorkman and Hedde Zeijlstra. 2014. Upward Agree is superior

Jonathan David Bobaljik. 2008. Where’s phi? Agreement as a post-syntactic operation. Phi- Theory: Phi features across interfaces and modules 4410:295–328

Eulàlia Bonet. 2008. The Person-Case constraint and repair strategies. In Agreement restrictions, 103–128. De Gruyter Mouton

Pavel Caha. 2009. The nanosyntax of case.

Noam Chomsky. 2000. Minimalist inquiries: The framework (MITOPL 15). Step by step: Essays on minimalist syntax in honor of Howard Lasnik: 89–155

Jessica Coon and Omer Preminger. 2017. Split ergativity is not about ergativity. In The Oxford handbook of ergativity.

Güliz Güneş. 2020. Variability in the realization of agreement in Turkish: A morphotactic account.

Ken Hiraiwa. 2001. Multiple agree and the defective intervention constraint in Japanese. MIT working papers in linguistics 40 (40): 67–80

Cem Keskin. 2009. Subject Agreement-Dependency of Accusative Case in Turkish.

Jaklin Kornfilt. 2003. Subject Case in Turkish nominalized clauses.

Julie Anne Legate. 2008. Morphological and abstract case. Linguistic inquiry 39 (1): 55–101 Theodore Levin and Omer Preminger. 2015. Case in Sakha: Are two modalities really necessary? Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 33 (1): 231–250

Theodore Levin and Omer Preminger. 2015. Case in Sakha: Are two modalities really necessary? Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 33 (1): 231–250

Alec Marantz. 1991. “Case and Licensing”. In Proceedings of the 8th Eastern States Conference on Linguistics, ed. Benjamin Westphal and Hee-Rahk Chae, 234–253. Ithaca, NY: CLC Publications

Mine Nakipoğlu. 2009. The semantics of the Turkish accusative marked definites and the relation between prosodic structure and information structure. Lingua.119: pp. 1253–1280

Andrew Nevins. 2011. Multiple agree with clitics: Person complementarity vs. omnivorous number. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 29 (4): 939–971

Balkız Öztürk. 2019. The loss of case system in Ardeshen Laz and its morphosyntactic consequences.STUF: Language Typology and Universals. Mouton de Gruyter.

Maria Polinsky and Eric Potsdam. 2001. Long-distance agreement and topic in Tsez. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 19 (3): 583–646

Omer Preminger. 2011. Agreement as a fallible operation. PhD thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Jean-Roger Vergnaud. 2008. Letter to Noam Chomsky and Howard Lasnik on ”Filters and Control,” April 17, 1977. Chap. 1 in Foundational Issues in Linguistic Theory: Essays in Honor of Jean-Roger Vergnaud, ed. Robert Freidin, Carlos P. Otero, and Maria Luisa Zubizarreta, 3–16. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press

Ellen Woolford. 2006. Lexical case, inherent case, and argument structure. Linguistic inquiry 37 (1): 111–130

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