The BU Linguistics Association (BULA) and the Department of Romance Studies are co-sponsoring the first lecture in the new series, LINGUISTICS FACULTY SPOTLIGHTS. ABSTRACT: Dialects in the North-West of England have been shown to allow strings like the following, where other dialects would require a preposition to (Haddican 2010, Biggs 2013, Myler 2011, 2013). (1) John came the pub with me. A striking fact (indicated by a comparison of Biggs 2013 and Myler 2011, 2013) is that constructions of this sort differ slightly in their syntactic properties amongst dialects of the North-West, with young Liverpool speakers allowing a wider range of "prepositionless" structures than speakers from elsewhere in the region and older Liverpool speakers. This talk will provide a general introduction to the dialects, describe the syntactic and semantic differences in their "preposition less" structures, and provide a syntactic account of those differences in terms of microparametric variation. This is also a Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/1467184243564344/ (RSVP's appreciated but not required)