Syntax Seminar 2018
| Date | Speaker & Title of Presentation |
|---|---|
|
Thursday, February 1, 11.00-13.00, room 1315.0055 |
Bernat Bardagil-Mas & Charlotte Lindenbergh |
|
Thursday, February 15, 15.00-17.00, room 1312.0122
|
María Arche Title: The bounds of the perfective |
| Thursday, February 22, 15.00-17.00 |
James Griffiths |
| Thursday, February 23, 11.00-13.00, room 1313.0346 |
Francesc Queixalós (CNRS) Title: Constituency and grammatical relations in Katukina-Kanamari |
| Thursday March 15, 11.00-13.00, room 1312 0019 |
Luis-Miguel Rojas-Berscia (Radboud Universiteit) |
| Thursday, April 19, 11.00-13.00, room 1312.0012 |
Astrid van Alem (Leiden University Centre for Linguistics) Title: Word order and person marking in West-Germanic imperatives |
|
Friday, May 18, 11.00-13.00, room 1312.0120
|
Charlotte Lindenberg (CLCG) Title: The problem of deriving phrases within phrases |
|
June 17, Groningen Syntax Workshop, Oude Boteringestraat 23
|
Speakers: Omer Preminger (University of Maryland), Anikó Lipták (Leiden University), Hedde Zeijlstra (Georg-August University Göttingen), and Jan-Wouter Zwart (University of Groningen) Organisers: Charlotte Lindenbergh & Bernat Bardagil |
|
Thursday, July 5, 11.00-13.00, room 1313.0340
|
Mark de Vries (CLCG) Title: The internal and external syntax of appositions |
|
2 augustus |
Pavel Rudnev |
|
1 november |
Mark de Vries |
|
21 november |
Jack Hoeksema |
|
5 & 19 december |
Jan-Wouter Zwart |
Note: This schedule is subject to change
Abstracts
Bernat Bardagil-Mas & Charlotte Lindenbergh - Realigning Alignment: A new take on Jê languages
The main alignment types that linguistics has focused on are the ergative and accusative alignment types. However, these types are often too broad to faithfully characterize the full diversity of alignment in a single language. To solve this problem, Lindenbergh & Zwart (2015) propose a more fine-grained typology, asking first whether or not all of the grammatical functions (transitive/intransitive subject, object) participate in a grammatical process or only a subset. This typology results in eighteen alignment types, grouped into alignment families, where we crucially see that the 'ergative family' and 'accusative family' each consist of five types, illustrating the intuition that a typological division of languages into ergative and accusative is too coarse. In this talk we take the Jê language family (Brazilian Amazonia) as a testing ground for the explanatory power of this fine-grained alignment typology. We find that Jê languages actually exhibit radically diverse alignment patterns, presenting a compelling argument for the adoption of a more fine-grained alignment typology to prevent overlooking crucial linguistic diversity.
James Griffiths - Reprise fragments in minimalism: an in-situ analysis
Luis-Miguel Rojas-Berscia - Antifunctional Ergativity in Shawi, a perceptual analysis
Ergativity as well as its various types of splits have been widely described in the literature on case-marking and typology (Silverstein 1976; Dixon 1994; Woolford 2009; Coon 2013; Gildea and Queixalós 2010). Silverstein argued for the existence of a Nominal Hierarchy, which explained cases in the languages of the world when an alternation of nominative-accusative and ergative-absolutive occurs. In this talk, I provide a description and an experimental assessment of ergativity in Shawi, a Kawapanan language of Northwestern Amazonia. Shawi displays ergative-marking in an opposite direction with regard to the NH. I claim this pattern to be anti-functional (Seuren and Hamans 2010), given the lack of internal syntactic cues that explain why ergativity is omitted or completely obligatory in cases where the NH predict the opposite.
To test this hypothesis I carried out a perceptual grammaticality judgement experiment in the field with 47 participants from Balsapuerto, Chayahuita, Cahuapanas and Jeberos. I then performed a Bayesian linear mixed-effects regression analysis (Salvatier, Wiecki, and Fonnesbeck 2016) on the data. We observe a significant main effect of the Antifunctional Ergativity Constraint Expectation, showing that participants can accurately judge the grammaticality of a given sentence, despite their low level of literacy or lack of formal schooling. Moreover, we found a significant overall effect of AECE: sentences that violated this constraint were in general deemed less acceptable. I provide a tentative hypothesis on the historical origin of this pattern, resorting to recent reconstructions of Proto-Kawapanan morphosyntax (Valenzuela 2011; Rojas-Berscia and Nikulin 2016; Rojas-Berscia and Bourdeau 2018).
Astrid van Alem - Word order and person marking in West-Germanic imperatives
| Laatst gewijzigd: | 30 juni 2021 14:47 |