SE-LFG17 (16/05/2015, SOAS)

17th South of England LFG Meeting

The 17th 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, 16 May 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, Cambridge & Oxford: Impersonals and subjectless constructions in Mapping Theory

12:00-12:30 Joey Lovestrand, Oxford: C-structure of Barayin (Chadic)

I am developing an analysis of the constituent-structure of Barayin, a Chadic language spoken by about 5000 people, as a foundation for an analysis of the structure of serial verb constructions in the language. Some questions are: Is there evidence for a functional category IP? To what extent can the use of non-projecting categories be appealed to in order to explain the distribution of certain function words and clitics? What rule best captures SVCs in which two finite verbs must be adjacent to each other with no intervening words?

12:30-2:00 lunch

2:00-3:00 Kersti Börjars and John Payne, Manchester: Noun-phrase internal functions in Old Norse

Old Norse noun phrases display relatively free word order. Though there is no definite account of what factors influences the word order, the traditional literature generally assumes that modifiers of different kinds tend to occur at the front of the phrase when they are emphasised, and hence there is an argument for a noun-phrase internal grammaticalised discourse function. The analysis of modifiers is further complicated by the fact that some adjectives require a separate marker in order to occur. So-called weak adjectives require the marker (h)inn in order to function as a modifier, whereas strong adjectives occur without a marker. Though (h)inn has been referred to as an 'adjective determiner' in the literature, there is no formal analysis which takes this claim seriously. In this talk, we develop an LFG analysis in which (h)inn combines with the weak adjective to allow it to function as an ADJ.

3:00-3:30 Shaimaa El-Sadek, Essex: Phasal verbs in Egyptian Colloquial Arabic: An LFG account

The current study aims to investigate the syntactic behaviour of phasal verbs in ECA, finding out what are the possible complements these verbs can take and how to represent these structures syntactically within the principles of LFG. Data was elicited from a corpus of ECA comprised of around 1.5 million words and collected from web resources such as forums, blog posts and articles. Concordances for each of these verbs were collected to investigate the possible structures of sentences where the verbs are used.

In the presentation I will show the different patterns of behaviours of these verbs suggesting their classification into subgroups according to the complements they take and syntactic behaviour of each. This will be illustrated using LFG tools capturing the various syntactic structures in which these verbs can occur and analysing each in terms of f-sructure and c-structure.

3:30-3:45 break

3:45-4:45 John Lowe, Oxford, and Oleg Belyaev, Russian Academy of Sciences: Clitic 'movement' in Ossetic

The positioning of so-called ‘second position’ clitics in Ossetic has never been fully described or subject to formal syntactic analysis. In this paper we present a formal account of clitic positioning in Ossetic within LFG. Our analysis is of interest not merely from the perspective of Ossetic studies, but also from a formal and typological perspective: Ossetic provides evidence for clitic (re)positioning of a type which to our knowledge has not previously been described or analysed.

4:45-5:00 planning for next time