VARINT21

This past week (18-19 November), I had the pleasure of presenting at Workshop on Linguistic Variation at the Interfaces II (VARINT21) hosted in Barcelona at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB). My talk about analytical causative structures and the PCC (handout here!) somewhat coincided with Michelle Sheehan‘s plenary talk on her most recent work on romance causatives and attempted to build off of much of the work she has done on the topic over the past couple of years.

There were a lot of great talks addressing numerous problems at the syntax-morphology and syntax-semantics interfaces, as well as talks that dealt with diachronic development (e.g. Roberta D’Alessandro’s talk on the idea of clausal expansion and “shrinking”). The most interesting for my research interests was Ricardo Etxepare’s presentation on fascinating data regarding non PLD-based innovative structures in Spanish-German bilinguals and Spanish-Basque bilinguals. These data were supported building on Theresa Biberauer’s Maximize Minimal Means (MMM) approach (most recently discussed here), a research model she has been developing over the past decade.