SE-LFG19 (20/02/2016, SOAS)

19th South of England LFG Meeting

The 19th 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, 20 February 2016, 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 Peter Austin, SOAS: Constructive morphology beyond case marking

Nordlinger (1997, 1998) argues that in certain dependent marking non-configurational languages case morphology does not merely reflect grammatical functions but can have a role in constructing them. She shows how f-structures can be constructed from the case-marked forms of nouns, including instances of double case-marking and use of case to encode TAM properties. In this paper I extend Nordlinger's proposals beyond case-marking to cover certain constructions in Australian Aboriginal languages where it can be argued that dependent verbal and nominal morphology constructs rather more complex f-structure representations, including information about functional control. Data from Mantharta and Kanyara languages will be provided to support this analysis.

12:00 - 12:30 Jamie Findlay, Oxford: Idioms in LFG

Idiomatic expressions come in a variety of types: some are syntactically fixed, such as by the by, while others are relatively flexible, such as pull strings, which allows all manner of manipulations (pull political strings; strings were pulled; the strings that were pulled, etc.) while still retaining its idiomatic meaning. At first blush, such multi-word expressions pose a challenge to a lexicalist theory such as LFG, since it seems that phrasal level ‘constructions’ must have some place in the lexicon in order to account for them. In this presentation, I will give an overview of (some of) the complex data surrounding idioms, before exploring one potential direction of analysis which builds on the work of Asudeh et al. (2013) on constructions.

12:30 - 2:00 Lunch

2:00 - 3:00 Kersti Börjars, Khawla Ghadgoud and John Payne, Manchester, Differential object marking in Libyan Arabic

In Libyan Arabic, direct objects can be either plain, as in (1a), or preceded by the differential object marker fi, as in (1b):

1. a. Ahmed kle el-kosksi

Ahmed eat.pst.3msg def-couscous

‘Ahmed ate couscous.’

b. Ahmed yakil fi el-kosksi

Ahmed eat.nont.3msg dom def-couscous

‘Ahmed is eating couscous.’

In another function, fi is the locative preposition “in”. The differential object marker fi is licensed when (a) the governing verb is dynamic, and (b) it takes the non-tensed form (regardless of the actual time reference of the clause). An interesting complication is that the occurrence of fi is blocked when a dynamic verb in the non-tensed form is subordinated to a verb which is itself stative. In this paper, we provide an LFG analysis of the interaction between aspectual and formal features which the licensing of fi entails.

3:00 - 3:15 Break

3:15 - 3:45 Eleanor Ridge, SOAS, Serial verb constructions and negative morphemes in Southeast Ambrym (Vanuatu)

Southeast Ambrym has serial verb constructions similar to those described in related languages as ‘core-layer' SVCs.

1) xi i-has ueili i-met

3s 3s.fut-hit pig 3s.fut-die.

‘He will kill the pig’

As Crowley (1987) has shown for closely related Paamese, the second verb must show subject agreement with the subject or object of the main verb, and the TAM morphology on the second verb is dependent on that of the main verb.

I propose that the modifying verbs in these constructions are best analysed as VP constituents that serve as adjuncts or complements to the main verb. I show that they are non-finite (as Meyerhoff (2001) argues for the equivalent construction in Bislama) because they cannot take an auxiliary verb that would appear as the optional head of IP, and because the TAM morphology can be predicted from the main verb.

In negative polarity the Southeast Ambrym constructions are more complicated than in Paamese where the second verb is always morphologically affirmative. Instead the second verb takes partial marking for negative polarity.

2) xi naa-vas ueili ti naa-met

3s 3s.neg-neg.hit pig neg 3s.neg-die

‘He won’t kill the pig’

While in a finite clause the negative mood is marked with a verbal prefix naa-/taa- and a post verbal clitic ti, verbs in this position only take the prefix. This means that negative marking in Southeast Ambrym cannot be analysed as a discontinuous morpheme as in other related languages. I will discuss possible ways to analyse the constraints that hold between the negative morphemes in an LFG framework.

3:45 - 4:15 Joey Lovestrand, Oxford, Comparing three LFG analyses of multiverb constructions with a semantically-bleached verb: Towards cross-classifying monoclausal multiverb constructions

4:15 - 4:30 Planning for next time