SE-LFG15 (01/11/2014, SOAS)

15th South of England LFG Meeting

We are planning the 15th 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, 1 November 2014, at SOAS, London. Please feel free to attend if you are interested, or if you would like more information please get in touch with Mary Dalrymple.

Meeting agenda:

11:00-12:00 John Lowe: Syntactic compounds in Sanskrit

Classical Sanskrit is well-known for making extensive use of compounding, to the extent that modern Western linguistics has adopted the Sanskrit names for certain compound types, such as bahuvrihi and dvandva. I argue that the major rules of compounding in Sanskrit are so productive and free that they can be most appropriately characterized in syntactic, not lexical, terms. The proposed analysis makes use of non-projecting categories, and has wider implications for modelling the gradient between syntactic phrase and lexical word.

12:00-1:00 Jamie Findlay: Mapping theory without argument structure

Asudeh & Giorgolo (2012) offer an analysis of optional and derived arguments that does away with argument structure as a separate level of representation within the LFG architecture in favour of encoding much of this information in a now connected semantic structure. This simplifies the architecture in many ways, but leaves open the question of the mapping between thematic roles, arguments and grammatical functions (traditionally explored under the umbrella of Lexical Mapping Theory (LMT)). In this talk, I offer some attempt to formalise these mapping relations, drawing on a modern reanalysis of traditional LMT by Anna Kibort (e.g. Kibort 2007).

Asudeh, Ash & Gianluca Giorgolo. 2012. Flexible composition for optional and derived arguments. In Miriam Butt & Tracy Holloway King (eds.), Proceedings of the LFG12 Conference, 64–84. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.http://www.stanford.edu/group/cslipublications/ cslipublications/LFG/17/papers/lfg12asudehgiorgolo.pdf.

Kibort, Anna. 2007. Extending the applicability of Lexical Mapping Theory. In Miriam Butt & Tracy Holloway King (eds.), Proceedings of the LFG07 Conference, 250–270. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.http://www.stanford.edu/group/cslipublications/ cslipublications/LFG/12/papers/lfg07kibort.pdf.

1:00-2:00 lunch

2:00-3:00 Kersti Börjars and John Payne: Constraining Equations in LFG

3:00-3:15 break

3:15-4:15 Andy Spencer: Individuating lexemes

I ask how we can distinguish distinct but related lexemes from different uses of the same lexeme in various formal models. A particularly tricky aspect of the problem is posed by transpositions: is a deverbal participle used as an attributive adjective a distinct lexeme/lexical entry from the base verb? If so, in what sense, if not, how come a verb has the morphosyntax of an adjective? [PDF of full abstract available below.]