SE-LFG16 (21/02/2015, SOAS)

16th South of England LFG Meeting

The 16th South of England LFG meeting, a student-oriented meeting for presentations and discussion of various topics from an LFG perspective, will be held on Saturday, 21 February 2015, 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 Anna Kibort, Oxford, The argument structure of causatives

I explore the consequences of the assumption that causativisation adds an additional participant to an event: a new causer. It is logically possible that an additional causer can be added to any event: a semantically intransitive, or transitive, or ditransitive event; or a semantically unaccusative or unergative event. The operation of adding a causer can be realised via a lexical process without any morphological exponent; a productive morphological process (such as affixation); or a syntactic process (periphrastic/analytic realisation). For any type of realisation, it seems crucial to establish whether the causative construction is monoclausal or biclausal, that is, whether there is an internal clause boundary within the construction and whether as a result the construction has two subjects rather than one. A biclausal causative does not pose a problem for LFG: it has been analysed as having two PREDs, which represent two events, and which share an argument. A monoclausal causative has so far been represented in LFG using an informal and poorly understood operations of 'predicate composition' and 'argument fusion'. I argue that there are good reasons to abandon these operations, and demonstrate that the recent version of the Mapping Theory can handle the addition of a causer to a single event in much the same way as it handles other argument operations which affect the semantics of the predicate. The addition of a new participant to a single event causes a similar re-alignment of participants and argument positions to that found in applicatives and in a variety of non-applicative argument alternations including dative shift. I demonstrate how to capture this re-alignment. The argument-to-function mappings are then handled with the standard tools of the Mapping Theory.

12:15-12:45 Chloe Barnes, Oxford, Are Russian Adversity Impersonal Constructions Really Impersonal?

Russian adversity impersonal constructions appear to lack a subject since no argument appears in the nominative case and the verb is always marked for third person singular neuter agreement regardless of the person, number or gender features of any arguments that are present. The results of an online questionnaire show that Russian adversity impersonal constructions must contain subjects since they can appear with raising-to-subject verbs. I will present an analysis of Russian adversity impersonal constructions in terms of pro-drop.

12:45-1:15 Sandy Ritchie, SOAS, 'Prominent internal possessors in Chimane'.

The paper will examine two constructions in which possessors which are apparently internal to possessive object NPs can play a prominent role in the clause-level syntax. In the first construction, the possessor controls object agreement on the verbal predicate. In the second, the possessor appears to block object agreement. The two constructions are analysed in terms of the syntactic and pragmatic properties of possessors and possessees.

1:15-2:15 lunch

2:15-3:15 Oleg Belyaev, Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 'Dargwa clause structure and the syntax of converbs'

Dargwa languages (North-East Caucasian) possess a complex system of periphrastic verb forms and, correspondingly, a multi-tiered clause structure, where auxiliars of different kinds attach at different levels. Non-finite forms, especially converbs, play a significant role in Dargwa grammar, acting as components of periphrastic forms and as the predominant way of marking clause combining. Converbs are also used in coordination-like contexts, thus raising the question of whether clauses headed by converbs are syntactically and semantically coordinating or subordinating.

In this talk, I will provide an LFG analysis of Dargwa clause structure and explore the place of converbs in this system, both as items heading adverbial clauses and as components of periphrastic forms. I will demonstrate how the modular architecture of LFG allows us to handle the problem of coordination vs. subordination in a clear and non-contradictory way.

3:15-3:30 break

3:30-4:00 Marjolein Poortvliet, Oxford, Argument mapping in perception verbs

Following Kibort’s (2007) and Findlay’s (2014) work, this talk will look into the mapping of the arguments of the verbs LOOK and SEE, and propose that these verbs share the same basic EXPERIENCER-STIMULUS template. The difference in argument structure is due to argument alternation similar to that found in active and passive sentences.

4:00-4:30 Stephen Jones, Oxford, 'Disambiguating questions in Korean: issues in mapping prosody to syntax'.

"Wh-words" in Korean are ambiguous between question words ('who?', 'what?') and indefinite pronouns ('someone', 'something'). As a result, questions containing these words are ambiguous between an open reading ('Who did auntie meet?') and a polar reading ('Did auntie meet someone?'): the ambiguity is resolved with prosody. This presentation examines some of the questions that arise in developing an LFG analysis of the disambiguation.

4:30-5:00 planning for next time