SE-LFG23 (13/05/2017, SOAS)

23rd South of England LFG Meeting

The 23rd 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, 13 May 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 Stephen Jones, Oxford: Towards a cognitive model of processing using LFG

11:30 Joey Lovestrand and John Lowe, Oxford: Rethinking projection in phrase structure

We discuss shortcomings in previous approaches to phrase structure in LFG by Bresnan (2001) and Marcotte (2014). We make a new proposal which has wider formal coverage and requires less superfluous structure within the tree. Our proposal is fully formalized and implemented in XLE.

12:30-2:00 Lunch

2:00 Eleanor Ridge, SOAS: One strategy, many functions: non-contiguous serial verb constructions in Southeast Ambrym

Non-contiguous serial verb constructions in Southeast Ambrym are a complex morphosyntactic strategy involving, at a minimum, restraints on argument structure, constituent order, clitic placement and morphology. Despite the formal specificity of this structure it can be used for a range of functional configurations, from adding adverbial information as an adjunct, introducing the complement of a three-argument event or even acting as a co-head to the predicate. This paper argues that a modular grammar like LFG is better placed to deal with these structures than a model that insists on alignment between formal and functional relationships like Role and Reference Grammar, which is commonly used to analyse serial verb constructions in the Oceanic literature.

2:30 Aicha Belkadi, SOAS: Marked nominative case, agreement and Differential Object Marking in Taqbaylit Berber

Taqbaylit Berber (Afroasiatic) follows a marked nominative case system: S and A are marked, O is unmarked. The presentation will explore contexts in which O appear in the same form as S/A. In terms of c-structure, there are no differences between unmarked and marked O. However, marked O are obligatorily topical and cross-referenced by an accusative pronominal clitic. A preliminary functional account of this phenomenon will be discussed.

3:30-3:45 Break

3:45 Jamie Findlay and Yoolim Kim, Oxford: When the subject honorific brings honour to all: the expanding role of pragmatics in Korean honorification

Korean subject-oriented honorifics have traditionally been described in syntactic terms, as honouring the subject of the clause they appear in. However, it has long been acknowledged that this is an idealisation, with these markers often indicating honorification of the possessor or other 'maximal human referent’ (Kim & Sells 2007) of the subject instead. We present data from one dialect of Korean which shows even greater divergence from the purely syntactic account, and argue for a pragmatic explanation, whereby the subject-oriented honorific honours an entity which stands in some pragmatically determined relation to the subject. We provide a tentative hierarchy of such relations, and show that its interpretive predictions are borne out.

4:15 Adam Przepiórkowski, Polish Academy of Sciences: Hierarchical lexicon and the argument/adjunct distinction

Abstract available here.

5:15 Planning for next time