SE-LFG12 (23/11/2013, SOAS)

12th South of England LFG Meeting

We are planning the 12th South of England LFG meeting, a student-oriented meeting for presentations and discussion of various topics from an LFG perspective. It is planned for Saturday, 23 November 2013, at SOAS, London. Please feel free to attend if you are interested, or if you would like more information please get in touch with Louise Mycock or Kakia Chatsiou.

We would like to thank Eleanor Ridge (SOAS) and Andrew Clark (SOAS) for their help with the local organisation of the meeting.

Meeting Agenda

11.00-12.00 'Supersymmetric' agreement? The case of Latin dominant participles Dag Haug (University of Oslo); joint work with Tanya Nikitina

12.00-12.30 Towards an LFG analysis of nuclear-layer serial verbs in Abma Eleanor Ridge (SOAS)

Abma uses nuclear-layer serialisation to express modal and adverbial meanings as well as complex events. The difference in the semantic structure of these two kinds of meaning is not reflected in any formal difference in the constructions. Moreover there are many verbs with ‘adverbial’ meanings that can only appear in these serial constructions, and one verb used to express the result of a complex event that cannot appear independently. Constructions involving these non-independent items fail a common criterion for serial verb constructions, but following Schneider (2010) I will argue for their verbal status, and try to account for their behaviour within an LFG framework. I will use data from Schneider’s 2010 Grammar of Abma and storybook, as well as from my own fieldwork conducted in March 2013.

12.30-13.00 Metrical Relations and Information Structure in LFG Geoff Gosby (University of Oxford)

In this talk I will present proposals for the representation of metrical relations and their interaction with information structure in LFG. The role of constraints on metrical relations in accounting for cross-linguistic variation in the linearisation of focused constituents has been modelled recently by Féry (2013) in the Optimality Theory framework. I show that metrical relations and constraints upon them can be accommodated straightforwardly within LFG with annotations to constituency at prosodic structure. These proposals include constraints on the linearisation of both primary and secondary metrical prominences, which are informed by evidence that Georgian, a language with dominant SOV word order, permits postnuclear prominences more readily than more familiar languages like English and German, and preferentially associates primary prominences with focused referential expressions.

In the theory of information structure proposed by Lambrecht (1994), VP-accented sentences may be formally underspecified for their associated focus construal, which is contextually determined. From the perspective of metrical relations, some of this formal underspecification can be accounted for in terms of the underspecification of secondary prominences, which may occur in VP-accented sentences, for either a focus or an inactive topic interpretation, in the absence of disambiguation from other aspects of sentence form. I show that this underspecification can be modelled in LFG with a mapping from secondary prominences at prosodic structure to the feature +ACTVN at discourse structure, adopted from the proposals of O’Connor (2006). In addition, I argue that non-referential expressions can be shown to behave more like referential expressions with respect to accentuation than Lambrecht’s (1994) framework acknowledges. Such an approach to the accentuation of non-referential expressions permits a characterisation of the relationship between sentence forms and focus construals which refers to metrical relations rather than to syntactic domains, which I incorporate into my proposed mapping from metrical relations to discourse structure. I also consider some possible accommodations of instances of ‘mismatch’ between the placement of metrical prominences and the accentuation requirements of sentences with respect to information structure.

[Abstract also available for download at bottom of page]

13.00-14.30 lunch

14.30-15.30 Archi as an extreme agreement system Marina Chumakina (Surrey Morphology Group, University of Surrey)

[Abstract available for download at bottom of page]

15.30-15.45 break

15.45-16.15 LFG and Processability Theory: acquiring marked word orders in Russian as a second language Marco Magnani (University of Verona)

Learning a second language (L2) is a complex task, involving cognitive and affective factors, both personal and social. Hence theories of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) are many and varied. Among them, Processability Theory (PT) offers a principled transitional paradigm that deals specifically with grammatical development (cf. Pienemann 1998; Pienemann, Di Biase & Kawaguchi 2005). In this paper I will illustrate how LFG contributes substantially to the formulation of PT’s developmental hypotheses. Specifically it provides PT with two fundamental concepts, ensuring that the different parts of a sentence fit together: the different syntactic (i.e., lexical, phrasal or sentence) levels within or across which their elements require unification; and the different kinds of correspondences among a-, c- and f-structures. Furthermore, within the PT framework, I will investigate the development of marked word orders in Russian L2. Russian seems a well-suited language for testing how learners acquire the ability to free up the rigidity of canonical word order constraints because of its high degree of nonconfigurationality, allowing for all the six permutations of the core elements in the clause. In this respect, the new proposal I wish to make here is that the learners’ staged development from canonical word order towards the full flexibility of choices in the Russian word order can be accounted for by recourse to King’s (1995) descriptive account of case assignments. Finally, I will show how some of the recent developments on information structure within LFG (cf., e.g., Dalrymple & Nikolaeva 2011) can further help PT to explain more consistently how discourse-pragmatic components pave the way towards the learners’ syntactic development. My hypotheses are then tested on cross-sectional data collected among 12 learners of Russian L2 at different proficiency levels and from a varied L1 background.

[Abstract also available for download at bottom of page]

16.15-16.45 Relative clauses in Tibetan. Andrew A Clark (SOAS)

16.45-17.15 Discussion and planning for next time