Guest speaker: Christopher Hammerly (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)

We are very pleased to welcome Christopher Hammerly, who is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His research is grounded in psycholinguistics and morphosyntax, and he is particularly interested in Ojibwe/Anishinaabemowin in accordance with his own heritage. His talk, "Processing obviation in Border Lakes Ojibwe," will be held on Friday, May 8, from 4:00 PM to 5:30 PM, via Zoom meeting. Please see the email in order to register to attend.

Obviation systems provide a means to mark the relative 'prominence' of third person nouns. When more than one third person is introduced into the discourse, one is placed 'in the spotlight', a role known as proximate, and all others are 'outside of the spotlight', a role known as obviative. These systems are a hallmark of Algonquian languages. In this talk, I consider how proximate-obviative marking is used to comprehend filler-gap dependencies into relative clauses in the Border Lakes dialect of Ojibwe, an Algonquian language of Northwest Ontario. Using evidence from a preferential looking experiment with native speakers of Border Lakes Ojibwe, I show that two basic preferences govern the interaction between filler-gap dependency resolution and obviation: (i) an agent-first preference, which prefers parses where the first noun encountered in a sentence is encoded as the thematic agent, and (ii) a preference for proximate nouns to be agents and obviative nouns to be patients. The results reveal how obviation is understood by speakers of Ojibwe, showing that it is fundamentally similar to other types of prominence-based information such as animacy. Finally, the data support an analysis of the direct/inverse agreement system where proximate nouns uniformly undergo passive-like promotion to the syntactic subject position. This provides another productive analogy, where direct-marked verbs are compared to active sentences, and inverse-marked verbs to passive.