This will be the first in our new series (co-sponsored by the
Department of Romance Studies): “BULA Linguistics Faculty
Spotlight.”
Thursday, October 2, 2014 at 7 pm in KCB 106
Prof. Neil Myler
“Going the pub and being the library:
A Microparameter in North-West
English Prepositional Phrases”
Abstract:
Dialects in the North-West of England have been shown to allow strings like the following, where other dialects would require a preposition to (Haddican 2010, Biggs 2013, Myler 2011, 2013).
(1) John came the pub with me.
A striking fact (indicated by a comparison of Biggs 2013 and Myler 2011, 2013) is that constructions of this sort differ slightly in their syntactic properties amongst dialects of the North-West, with young Liverpool speakers allowing a wider range of “prepositionless” structures than speakers from elsewhere in the region and older Liverpool speakers. This talk will provide a general introduction to the dialects, describe the syntactic and semantic differences in their “preposition less” structures, and provide a syntactic account of those differences in terms of microparametric variation.
Refreshments will be served.