SE-LFG22 (04/02/2017, SOAS)

22nd South of England LFG Meeting

The 22nd 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, 4 February 2017, 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: Alex Biswas, Oxford: (Inflectional) periphrasis revisited

This talk presents an analysis of inflectional periphrasis in the Tundra Nenets nominal paradigm and considers the wider question of what should be considered periphrasis.

11:30: Ryo Otoguro, Waseda University: Object agreement in Icelandic: Person feature, prominency and information structure

This paper focuses on morphosyntactic properties of nominative objects in Icelandic. I argue that whether they can be an agreement controller or not depends on their information structure role. Further, I show that the person feature restriction on nominative objects can also be accounted for by their prominency in information structure.

12:30-2:00: Lunch

2:00: Khawla Ghadgoud, Manchester: Metalinguistic Negation in Libyan Arabic

The talk is about a special negative marker miŝ in Libyan Arabic, that distinguishes metalinguistic negation from standard negation.

2:30: Paloma Carretero Garcia, Essex: Gender in Asturian

In this talk I will introduce gender in Asturian, a language spoken in Asturias, a region in Northwestern Spain. Asturian shows a three gender distinction: masculine, feminine and neuter. In general terms, nouns are only feminine or masculine and the neuter appears on articles, adjectives and personal pronouns that agree with abstract and uncountable nouns. I will discuss the possible mismatches that might occur within and outside the noun phrase and try to address gender resolution.

3:00-3:30: Break

3:30: Jamie Findlay, Oxford: Multiword expressions and lexicalism

Multiword expressions (MWEs) seem to be lexical, in that they are arbitrary pairings of form and meaning that cannot be predicted, but they also have internal structure which is available to syntactic rules. This is a problem for lexicalist theories such as LFG in that it violates the strong form of the lexical integrity principle, which entails that a lexical item can only be realised as a syntactically atomic word. In this talk, I demonstrate some of the problems facing any strongly lexicalist account of MWEs, and argue that the lexical integrity principle must be weakened.

4:00: Hannah Booth, Manchester: The development of overt expletives in Icelandic

This talk presents results from an ongoing corpus-based investigation of the development of expletive subjects in Icelandic. The investigation traces the historical spread of the expletive subject það across various construction types and considers possible motivations behind this development.

4:30: Planning for next time