Unpeeling an onion: what Vietnamese tells us about the lexicon-syntax interface

Last week, I had the great fortune to attend the International Conference on Linguistics Training and Research in Vietnam, held at USSH, VNU, Hanoi. My first visit to Vietnam, I hope the first of many. During my stay, I was able to give two presentations. I'm posting the slides from the first colloquium talk, which will be written up more fully shortly (and essentially a synopsis of Chapter 1 of the elusive, but not quite mythical, monograph). In the meantime, there should be enough on the slides to make for useful reading. If you have comments or questions—about Vietnamese syntax, though not about onions—please get in touch.

Click to view presentation

(I've replaced the html version with a pdf file, which should be easier to read)

Problems with 13 Little Boats

For a number of reasons, I have had cause to go back to—and reformat—a paper on Irish numeral phrases that I presented long ago (in 1995) at a Canadian Linguistics Association Meeting. The paper was to have appeared in the Proceedings, but I have not been able to find any existent copies or links to such. If anyone knows of a link where this publication can be found, I'll take this down; otherwise, it's available here.

Click to access pdf file

Arcane as the topic may seem, the syntax of numeral phrases is, I think, a revealing phenomenon, showing the possible limits of conventional phrase-structure syntax to handle discontinuous dependencies and spreading agreement. It also offers a good treatment of classifier phrases in East Asian languages (developing ideas originally due to Elisabeth Löbel 1990). It was written at a time when I still believed that a purely syntactic solution was the best solution to every problem: I'm less sure now, but it's not a bad technical attempt.