Research Groups: Friday, March 8

10:00 AM - 11:30 AM, SS560A
Language Variation and Change Research Group
Vijay Ramjattan (OISE): "A raciolinguistic perspective on the perception of foreign accents."

11:30 AM - 1:00 PM, SS560A
Phonology Research Group
TBA

1:00 PM-2:30 PM, SS560A
Semantics Research Group
Andrew Peters (Ph.D.): "Mongolian converbs and the macro-event property."
The degree to which structure plays a role in meaning in balance with the compositional semantics of a sentence is a difficult to answer question in S-side linguistics generally. In the study of temporal-locating adverbs and subordinated clauses in a variety of languages, it has been suggested that the structural height of these projections relative to tense, aspect, the VP etc. has independent ramifications for the temporal interpretation of the clause on whole (cf. Bary and Haug 2011 on Greek Participles). In this presentation of a work in progress, I discuss the case of Mongolian converb clauses and their temporal interpretations relative to the matrix predicate. Mongolian – like other Altaic and Turkic languages – has a wide array of converb suffixes which do the work of subordinators, coordinators and participles in languages like English, and which are said to be dependent on a tensed matrix verb for TAM. Fieldwork in Chakhar Mongolian has revealed that converb suffixes vary widely in their independence from the matrix verb, and I suggest that this is correlated with the necessity that some converbs’ temporal interpretation be anaphoric to a reference time provided or made salient by the matrix verb. This analysis draws parallels with Altshuler’s (2014) account of temporal locating adverbs which suggests that only some, but not all, temporal adverbs introduce a new reference time. I argue for Mongolian that those converbs which do not introduce their own reference time must appear in configurations which permit them to be anaphoric to a reference time introduced by the matrix predicate. Specifically, I show that these configurations are identifiable by bearing Bohnemeyer et al.’s (2007) Macro-event Property. Bohnemeyer et al.  conclude – and I agree – that this property is not definable cross-linguistically based on syntactic configurations alone, however I suggest that in a given language this property may only be possible in certain configurations. Thus, the kinds of syntactic ramifications on interpretation that Bary & Haug observed in Greek and which may be observed as well in Mongolian, are epiphenomenal. Simply stated: some converbs in Mongolian are dependent on the matrix verb for their temporal interpretation, which is only possible when they may form a macro-event with the main predicate, which limits the available syntactic configurations where these converbial clauses may merge. Thus it is not the syntax itself which contributes meaning, but rather the restrictions that the lexical semantics of the converb suffixes themselves impose on the syntax in order to form licit sentences.