The Department of Linguistics proudly presents Dr. Kyle Johnson, from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.  Dr. Johnson will speak on "Implicit Objects as Incorporated Theta-roles".

Some verbs are capable of being used without an expression of their arguments. The direct and indirect objects of eat and throw are standard examples.
(1)  a. Marlys ate cake.
          Marlys ate.
      b. Marlys threw the ball to Sam.
          Marlys threw the ball.

The meanings of eat and throw preserve the θ-roles that cake and to Sam bear, even when those arguments are not present.Those θ-roles are understood to be existentially closed. They are said to be implicit when this happens. The ability for a θ-role to be implicit seems to be idiosyncratically controlled by the verb, but it does not extend to external arguments. Tomake an external θ-role implicit, a valency changing operation is required.An external/internal argument contrast of this sort is also found inmany kinds of Noun Incorporation constructions.The lexically idiosyncratic nature of making a θ-role implicit also seems to be a feature of someNoun Incorporation constructions.Martí (2015) argues that the syntax and semantics of Noun Incorporation underlies making a θ-role implicit. I will pursue that thesis in this talk. I will suggest that we should think of θ-roles as being kinds of nominals, and sketch a syntax thatmakes sense of that idea.One of its consequences is that θ-roles can undergo Incorporation, and this is how implicit arguments are achieved.

Kyle graduated with a BA in psychology from the University of California-Irvine in 1981. UC, Irvine had an interesting group of cognitive psychologists at that time working on learning theory, attention, and visual perception. The cognitive science group included linguists -- Mary-Louise Kean, Peter Culicover, Bernard Tranel, Ed Matthei, Ken Wexler, and Stephen Crain, who was a graduate student. Dr. Johnson learned about linguistics from them and went on to study it at MIT, where he got a PhD in 1985. On his way to the position he now has at UMass, he taught, and mostly learned, at the University of Connecticut at Storrs, UC-Irvine, UCLA, University of Wisconsin at Madison and McGill University. His specialization is in syntactic theory. 

Funded in part by the GPSAFC and Open to the Graduate Community.