Term 1 Courses

Tim Jantarungsee is a PhD student at UCL Linguistics specialising in formal semantics and endangered language documentation. His research interests include the semantics of modal "ability" expressions, cross-linguistic lexical semantics of "eating" predicates, fieldwork methodology, language policy and decolonising linguistics, working with minoritised languages in East and South-East Asia.

Week 1: Wednesday 29th October, 14:00 - 15:00, CH G06

This week will cover all the empirical properties of presuppositions, distinguishing them from other types of implications and talk a little about the history and overview some of the core theories (will dive deeper into them in the following weeks). Theories of presupposition straddle the line between formal semantics & pragmatics, so one of the goals will be to try and make that line explicit so we can see exactly how they interface.

Readings:

• If you have little time and are lazy: Beaver & Geurts (2014) Presupposition In the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• If you have a bit more time but you're still kinda lazy: Chapters 5 of Kadmon (1990) Formal Pragmatics
• If you're a nerd: both the above + Karttunen & Peters (1979) Conventional implicature; Geurts (1999) Presuppositions and pronouns (first part); Beaver (2001) Presupposition and Assertion in Dynamic Semantics (part 1).

Handout: Presupposition-Pals-week-1.pdf

Week 2: Thursday 30th October, 11:00 - 12:00, CH G06

Topic: Satisfaction Theory I

This week, I will introduce Heim's dynamic semantics (File Change Semantics) and its application towards explaining the projection problem.

Readings:

• If you have little and are lazy: Heim (1988) On the Projection Problem for Presuppositions
• If you have a bit more time, but you're still rather lazy: Above reading + Kadmon (1990) Chapter 6
• If you're a nerd: Both of the above + Rothschild (2011), Explaining presupposition projection with dynamic semantics; Beaver (2001), Presupposition and Assertion in Dynamic Semantics Part II; Heim (1982), The Semantics of Definite and Indefinite Noun Phrases

Handout: Presuppositions-week-2.pdf

Week 3: Thursday 6th November, 11:00 - 12:00, Room 101

Topic: Satisfaction Theory II

This week I will talk more about Satisfaction Theory. Specifically, how it deals with projection through quantification, which is a tricky and complex topic. I will also talk about the criticisms towards Satisfaction Theory, which have typically been grouped together to be known as the 'proviso problem'.

Readings:

• Readings this week are the same as last week, but also include:
• Geurts (1996). Local satisfaction guaranteed: A presupposition theory and its problems.
• Mandelkern (2016). Dissatisfaction theory.

Handout: Presuppositions-week-3.pdf

Week 4: Thursday 13th November, 11:00 - 12:00, Room 204, 40 Bernard Street

Topic: Trivalent Theories & the Definite Descriptor

This week we will explore trivalent theories of presupposition and examine the semantics of definite descriptions.

Readings:

• Coppock & Champollion (2025) Invitation to Formal Semantics, pp. 328-358
• Beaver (2001) Presupposition and Assertion in Dynamic Semantics, Chapter 2

Handout: Presuppositions-week-4.pdf

Week 5: Thursday 27th November, 11:00 - 12:00, Chandler House, Room G06

Topic: Cross-linguistic presupposition

This week we will look at presuppositions from a cross-linguistic perspective and try and determine whether or not the data actually informs our semantic/pragmatic theories. We will also consider how exactly we would elicit data on presuppositions if we were to do semantic fieldwork on the topic.

Note: I understand that I'm changing the topic really late so I don't expect anyone to really have time to do the readings. Don't worry though, I'll be sure to summarise everything well in the handout.

Readings:

• Lisa Matthewson. Presuppositions and Cross-Linguistic Variation. 2006.
• Lisa Matthewson. Pronouns, Presuppositions, and Semantic Variation. 2009.

Abdullah Almuhaysh is a PhD student at UCL Linguistics specialising in the morphosyntax of Arabic tense and aspect. He also delves into phonology (autosegmental morphophonology) and the formal semantics of tense and aspect in order to account for modern Arabic dialects and how they lexicalise their VPs and auxiliaries.

Morphology is the branch of linguistics that studies words by asking questions such as: What are words? How are they structured? The aim of this course is to familiarise students with crosslinguistic morphological phenomena and terminology before tackling work on theoretical frameworks. We will also consider how syntax, semantics, and phonology are related to morphology. Thus, this class is a buffet that invites the students to sample the delicious dishes of morphology in hopes of indulging into them further in the future.

Week 1: What Is Morphology About?

5th November, 15:00-16:00, Room 201 Chandler House

We will begin the first day by easing our way in and introducing key terminology about morphology. This should serve either as an appetizer to totally new students, or a refresher to students familiar with the different morphological units (such as morphemes). We will also briefly look at the inflection vs derivational dichotomy, as well as the concept of allomorphy.

Week 2: More Morphological Phenomena

12th November, 15:00-16:00, Room G03 Chandler House

During the second week, we will explore general morphological phenomena, such as borrowing, compounding, and clipping. However, we will consider very interesting phenomena such as suppletion, syncretism, word classes (such as gender), and zero morphology.

Week 3: The Morphology and Phonology Interface: Autosegmental (Morpho)phonology

19th November, 15:00-16:00, Room 301 Chandler House

During the third week, we will tackle the problem of non-concatenative morphology: Cases where morphological operations seem to be disjoined, unlike English's dominantly concatenative morphology (base-suffix patterns). We will focus greatly on languages such as Arabic and how they employ templatic morphology in order insert disjoined affixes. We will see how morphological affixation is not restricted to consonants and vowels, but also to suprasegmental elements such as tone and stress, and subsegmentals such as phonological features (+nasal, -plosive, etc).

Week 4: Morphosyntax: The Morphology and Syntax Interface

26th November, 17:00-18:00, Room 201 Chandler House

During the fourth week, we will ponder the status of morphology and syntax. We will see how they are similar in their structuring (constituents in words and sentences). We will also take a closer look at morphosyntactic phenomena such as agreement and concord, Mark Baker 1985's mirror principle, verbal auxiliary data, and an interesting morphophonology constraint on the comparative and superlative morphosyntax of Hasawi Arabic.

Week 5: Morphological Universals: *ABA and Greenberg Universal 20 in Morphology

3rd December, 15:00-16:00, Room 201 Chandler House

In the final session, we will consider two postulated universal constraints in morphology: Bobaljik 2012's *ABA constraint and Kloudova 2020's take of Greenberg Universal 20 in morphology. We will see how these constraints are related to phenomena such as syncretism, suppletion, and morphological containment. Finally, we will point towards an entrance to morphological theory before concluding the course.

Term 2 Courses

Erying Qin is a PhD student at UCL Linguistics working on experimental pragmatics, which aims to use methodologies drawn from experimental psychology to investigate current theories of semantics and pragmatics for human language. Her doctoral work focuses on scalar inferences for different scalar words, particularly for paucal quantifiers.

Pragmatics is the branch of linguistics concerned with context-dependent meaning, compared to semantics that deals with the meaning of words and sentences in isolation. As a relatively new research area, experimental pragmatics is a subfield of pragmatics that uses empirical, experimental methods to study how meaning is shaped by factors like the speaker's intentions, the listener's interpretation, the context of the conversation, and social norms. In this module, we consider examples of research topics in experimental pragmatics and cognitive mechanisms (e.g., reaction time, working memory load) which are used to investigate theories in pragmatics research.

Day 1: Introduction to experimental pragmatics

In the first half of this session, we will introduce experimental pragmatics and its research topics in general. If time permits, we will take a glance at the concept of Scalar Inference (or Scalar Implicature, if you like), which is one of the commonly-studied pragmatic phenomena.

Day 2: Scalar Inferences: what working memory tells us about pragmatic inferences

This session will explore the studies on Scalar Inferences. We will take working memory as an example - to see how methods commonly used in psychology/psycholinguistics experiments can be applied to answer research questions in experimental pragmatics.

Day 3: Perspective-taking in implicature derivation: what developmental study tells us about pragmatic inferences

In this session, we will discuss inferences in a more general way. As pragmatics focuses on how meaning can vary depending on the speaker's and listener's perspectives, and there is usually a developmental difference in perspective-taking between children and adults, research that incorporates these factors adds another piece to the puzzle of studies on pragmatic inferences.

Day 4: Why Are Negative Sentences Hard to Process?

This session will present various experimental findings and review current accounts of negation processing. Why are negative sentences generally more demanding to process than affirmative ones? How can we explain this difficulty? Specifically, we will explore the extra cognitive effort required to interpret negative sentences and examine the role that positive arguments play in this process.

Day 5: Another Look from the Dynamic Pragmatic View: Evidence Across Different Tasks

In this session, we will evaluate the dynamic pragmatic view of negation processing, drawing on evidence from various experimental pragmatics tasks. In particular, we will focus on one negation and the sentence-picture verification task. Additionally, we will review many factors at play in verification tasks when negation is involved, highlighting how these factors may influence processing.

Course details and weekly topics will be announced soon. This course will explore NP ellipsis phenomena from a syntactic perspective. Taught by Andrew Duy La, a PhD student at UCL Linguistics.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Curabitur vel sem sit dolor neque semper magna. This is a placeholder for the upcoming syntax course on NP Ellipsis. Full course description and weekly breakdown will be provided at the start of Term 2.

Ayşenur Coşkun is a PhD student at UCL Linguistics working on the syntax of complementation clauses in Altaic languages, with a particular focus on subjunctive obviation and phasehood. Her doctoral research explores how theoretical notions such as phase boundaries, locality, and feature distribution shape cross-linguistic variation, especially in less-studied languages like Kazakh and Uyghur.

Phase Theory is introduced in Chomsky (2000, 2001) and significantly revised in Chomsky (2008). Phases are 'the closest syntactic counterpart to a proposition: either a verb phrase in which all theta roles are assigned or a full clause including tense and force' (Chomsky 2000: 106). The syntactic derivation proceeds in chunks called phases, each with its own locality constraints. They are reported to be the determiner of the Transfer to the interfaces by spelling out. The spelled-out structures are not available for further operations outside of the phase (Citko 2014).

Session 1: Merge over Movement (MoM) and the Phase Theory

The first session introduces the motivation for Phase Theory within the Minimalist Program. We begin by discussing the Merge-over-Movement principle and how it guides derivational economy. We then turn to the fundamental concepts of Phase Theory, exploring why phases exist, how they interact with cyclic Spell-Out, and how locality and movement restrictions arise from phase-based derivations.

Session 2: The Phase Impenetrability Condition (PIC)

This session focuses on the PIC discussing how phases are spelled-out as formulated in Chomsky (2008). We will distinguish between the strong (also called PIC1) and weak (also called PIC2) versions of the PIC.

Session 3: Feature Inheritance

We examine the mechanism of feature inheritance as in Chomsky (2008) —what it is, why it was proposed, and how much structure and featural content are inherited from C to T (and v to V).

Session 4: Phase Characteristics and Diagnostics I

This session introduces how to diagnose a phase head and what are the indicators of phasehood. We will explore reconstruction effects, floating quantifier distribution, and wh-copying as potential indicators of phasehood.

Session 5: Phase Characteristics and Diagnostics II — Partial Wh-Movement and Complementizer Agreement

In the final session, we continue with further diagnostics of phasehood. We examine partial wh-movement and complementizer agreement, focusing on how these phenomena reveal the interaction between locality and movement. We will assess how far phase-based explanations can reach, and what open questions remain in identifying the empirical signature of phases.

Term 3 Courses

Term 3 course details will be announced soon. Join our mailing list to stay updated!