Aron back at McGill

Only...

Friday January 17, Aron Hirsch '11 is back at his alma mater, McGill University, to give the colloquium talk, "Only scope in English and German," in the Department of Linguistics, this time as Professor Hirsch. His abstract is below. Aron will stay over the weekend, and on Monday the 20th will also lead a reading group in the department - in which Aron may fairly ask, "Was the man who founded this university, as well as the Beaver Club, the only famous person named James McGill?"

Only is traditionally defined as a propositional operator. Yet, syntactically, only can attach to a DP. One response is to modify the semantics, so that only can compose with a DP to form a quantifier (e.g. Rooth 1985). An alternative response is to modify the syntax. In one analysis, overt only is taken to be an inert focus marker at the DP-level, whose morphology reflects concord with a covert ONLY taking propositional scope (e.g. Quek & Hirsch 2017, Hirsch 2017, after Bayer 1999, Lee 2004, Hole 2015, 2017). In this talk, we provide novel evidence for the latter approach by comparing the scope behavior of only in English and German. Our aim is to show that differences between the two languages follow for free from independent constraints in the concord system. This talk reports on joint work with Michael Wagner.