(Courtesy of Julie Doner)
There will be two meetings of syntax-semantics project this week, as follows. Please
take note of the special time for the first meeting.
"Kaqchikel Agent Focus as anti-locality"
Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine, MIT
Thursday, October 3rd 4:30-6:30 pm in BL 114
Abstract: Many Mayan languages show a syntactically ergative extraction asymmetry whereby the
A-bar extraction of subjects of transitives requires special verbal morphology,
known as Agent Focus. In this talk I discuss the syntax of Agent Focus in Kaqchikel,
a Mayan language spoken in Guatemala. I argue that Agent Focus does not simply occur
whenever an ergative subject is A-bar extracted---as predicted by previous
approaches---but is instead a strategy to avoid a movement step which is *too
short*. Support for this claim comes from new data on the distribution of Agent
Focus in Kaqchikel which shows this locality-sensitivity. Time permitting, I will
discuss the notion of "last-resort" and motivate the use of a system of ranked,
violable constraints to model the full pattern of Agent Focus and verbal agreement
observed in the language.
"Deducing clause structure from the right periphery in T??ch? Yat?ì"
Nick Welch, U of T
Friday, October 4th 12-2 pm in SS 560A.
Abstract: T??ch? Yat?ì, a Dene language of the Northwest Territories, Canada,
has a number of post-verbal auxiliaries and particles indicating
categories such as futurity, mode, negation, information structure and
evidentiality. The interaction of these elements reveals that they
occur in a strict order, which in turn illuminates the structure of
the clause in this language, with positions for future, mode,
negation, and focus as functional categories at the right edge.
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