S-Side Story is a group that discusses the exciting developments in syntactic research and its interfaces. Since June 2021, S-Side Story has taken over the former Syntax+. Given the increasing amount of interest and work in semantics and the interface with morphology, but also psycholinguistics, the plus sign was too underspecified to capture everything. The new name aims to represent the multifaceted research interests of the group while still maintining syntax at its core.
We hold regular meetings for students and faculty members to present their research projects and get feedback. Occassionally, we have special talks given by invited speakers.
All topics which are of relevance to syntax, semantics, and their interfaces are welcome. If you want to schedule a presentation at S-Side Story or want to be added to the mailing list, please contact Yingyu Su (yingyus@usc.edu).
We currently meet from 2:00pm to 3:00pm every Wednesday in GFS 330. All are welcome!
Check out the schedule for Fall 2025 Presentations:
Week 1 (8/27): Organizational meeting
Week 2 (9/3): Deniz Rudin “Unconventionalizing Common Ground”
Week 3 (9/10): Zhendong Liu “Optional Ergativity in Lhasa Tibetan as a Property of Phrasal Nominalizations”
Week 4 (9/17): Andrew Simpson & Zhixian Huang “Complex Causes of Word Order Variation: a Study of Object (Re-)positioning in Chinese”
Week 5 (9/24): Nelly Marutyan “Phase-Based Stress Assignment: the Case of Eastern Armenian”
Week 6 (10/1): Peter O’Neill “Distribution of Tense Across Nonfinite Complements: Evidence from Futurate Genrundives”
Week 7 (10/8): Metehan Oğuz & Burak Öney (Cornell) “Complex Nominal, Binding, and Agreement in Turkish”
Week 8 (10/15): Sahar Taghipour (UCLA) “Ergative and Absolutive Agreement: Microvariation in Kurdish”
Week 9 (10/22): Po-Hsuan Huang “Indexing political identity through syntactic variables”
Week 10 (10/29): JK Subramony “Classifying Inherent Complement Verbs in Avatime”
Week 11 (11/5): Zhi Zheng “Agreement Mistmatch in Uyghur Partitives”
Week 12 (11/12): (Break)
Week 13 (11/19): Zhixian Huang “An alternative-sensitive modal operator: ʑuebiɛ in Jiaxing Wu Chinese”
Week 14 (Thanksgiving Break)
Week 15 (12/3): Yingyu Su “’Denominal’ Verbs without n: Evidence from Tonal Verbalizer in Nantou Hua”