SE-LFG18 (31/10/2015, SOAS)

18th South of England LFG Meeting

The 18th 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, 31 October 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 John Lowe, Oxford: Complex Predicates: an LFG+glue analysis

I discuss weaknesses in the traditional LFG account of complex predicates, and in the XLE implementation. I argue that the concept of predicate composition in general, and the mechanisms required to achieve it, are problematic; the most problematic element is the concept of argument fusion. I show that a semantically integrated account of complex predicate formation is possible within LFG+glue, providing a simple and effective formalization of argument fusion, which does not suffer from the weaknesses of traditional approaches.

12:00-12:30 Charlotte Hemmings, SOAS: Word order and information structure in Kelabit

Kelabit is a Western Austronesian language spoken mainly in the Fourth and Fifth divisions of Sarawak, Malaysia (Martin 1996). It is part of the Kelabitic subgroup of Northern Sarawak and shares many typical characteristics of Western Austronesian, including a system of symmetrical voice alternations. Western Austronesian languages differ in their basic word-order. Philippine‑type languages tend to be verb‑initial, whilst Indonesian-type languages are typically SVO (Donohue 2007). In Kelabit, both verb-initial and SVO word-orders are found. Intransitive and undergoer voice transitive clauses tend to be verb-initial, whilst actor voice transitive clauses tend to be SVO. This paper explores possible explanations for a) word-order choice and b) the different word-order preferences according to voice construction by analysing the role of information structure in a corpus of naturalistic texts in a range of genres. It appears that information structure plays a key role in determining subject-initial order in undergoer voice, but that initial-position may be being reanalysed as a structural subject position in actor voice.

12:30-2:00 Lunch

2:00-3:00 Andy Spencer, Essex: Participial relative clauses in LFG

In many languages relative clauses are expressed by a participial form of the verb. This is a ‘mixed category’, in that it retains (much of) the verb’s argument structure and often other properties (voice, aspect, tense) but has the external morphosyntax of an adjective (e.g. adjective-noun agreement). I critically review LFG approaches to such category mixing and argue that we should take the model of lexical representation proposed in Spencer (1999, 2013) as the basis for analysing such constructions.

3:00-3:15 Break

3:15-3:45 Paloma Carretero Garcia, Essex: Psychological predicates in Spanish

In this talk, I will discuss predicates in Spanish whose argument structure involves an experiencer and a theme and the different mapping alternatives for such arguments. I will focus on a type of predicate that diverges from the standard SVO order for Spanish (Belletti and Rizzi, 1988; Vogel and Villada, 1999). This group of predicates displays the pattern: Dative NP + dative clitic + V + Nominative NP. The data presented will show the mismatch between the “logical” subject and the syntactic subject, challenging the more traditional concept of “subjecthood” (Keenan, 1976). I will use the behaviour of the dative clitic in these constructions (as opposed to standard ditransitive use, for example) to illustrate my discussion on the status of the dative-marked argument.

3:45-4:45 Anna Kibort, Cambridge: Argument structure templates and their realisations

4:45-5:00 Planning for next time