Prof. Jesus Olguin-Martinez has been invited to teach a course at the LSA Summer Institute.
The Institute will be held at the University of Oregon Linguistics Department in 2027. It is the largest and most prestigious summer school for linguistics in the world and has been held since 1928. It is run under the auspices of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) and is designed as an intensive, short-course summer school format that brings together leading scholars across many subfields.
Prof. Jesus Olguin-Martinez will teach the following course:
Morphosyntax beyond the simple clause:
Formal and functional perspectives
Although formal and functional approaches have provided influential accounts of morphosyntactic phenomena, students are often introduced to these traditions separately. The primary goal of the course is to train students to identify the strengths and limitations of both approaches when investigating morphosyntax by using adverbial clauses as the main empirical domain. These complex sentences provide an ideal testing ground because they show intriguing interactions between linguistic features that have received attention in the formal and functional literature.
The course is organized around four case studies: semantically negative adverbial clauses (e.g., he doesn’t walk, let alone run); exceptive clauses (e.g., he says nothing except that he is tired), counterfactual clauses (e.g., if you had gone, you would have seen her), and adverbial clauses whose clause-linking devices can also function as complementizers. Students will investigate how these constructions interact with a range of variables in language use: (i) standard negation and mono-/polyfunctionality of clause-linking devices in semantically negative adverbial clauses, (ii) clausal order in exceptive clauses, (iii) irrealis markers and blocking effects in counterfactuals, and (iv) the morphosyntactic complexity of adverbial clause-linking devices that also occur in complement clauses. Along the way, students will compare and evaluate both formal and functional analyses of these phenomena. In addition to its theoretical focus, the course emphasizes the methodological skills required to identify, code, and analyze these interactions in descriptive grammars.
The overarching thesis of the course is that such fluid interactions between linguistic features are constantly reorganized under the influence of internal and external factors (e.g., language contact).