As part of McMaster University's 2020-21 Cognitive Science of Language lecture series, Yining Nie (MA 2015, now at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) will be giving an online talk. After her MA in our department, Yining earned her Ph.D. in 2020 from New York University with a focus on morphosyntax, especially argument structure and event structure. She is now a postdoctoral fellow at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, working on cognitive aspects of L1 acquisition. Yining's talk, "Event distinctness and the cross-linguistic expression of causation," will be taking place on Tuesday, March 16, from 10:30 AM to 12 PM. See the email for a Zoom link.
Causative sentences with transparent causative marking are often assumed to encode distinct causing and caused events (e.g. Someone made the plate break), while causatives with no overt marking have non-distinct or overlapping events (e.g. Someone broke the plate). In this talk, I show that transparent causatives differ cross-linguistically in event distinctness, using several syntactic diagnostics. While transparent causatives in language such as English and Japanese encode two distinct events, transparent causatives in many languages such as Tagalog (Malayo-Polynesian; Philippines) encode only one event. I also present evidence of spurious causative marking in both child and adult languages. I conclude that event distinctness does not apply equally across languages, nor in language development.
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