SE-LFG24 (04/11/2017, SOAS)

24th South of England LFG Meeting

The 24th 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 November 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: Kersti Börjars and Nigel Vincent, University of Manchester: The less you WANT the more you get WILL

In their account of diachronic semantic trajectories Bybee et al (1994: 256) propose the historical sequence: DESIRE > WILLINGNESS > INTENTION > PREDICTION. The history of the WILL verb in the Germanic languages is commonly taken as a classic instance of this, with modern Swedish vilja retaining the ‘desire’ meaning, English will having the ‘prediction/future’ meaning and Danish ville allowing both meanings in different contexts. In our talk we will:

a) revisit this case history and argue that the trajectory needs to be revised with WILLINGNESS being assigned to a separate dimension;

b) incorporate the evidence from Bylin (2017) that Swedish started down the same semantic path only for the PREDICTION pattern to be subsequently lost;

c) propose an LFG-based account of these changes involving a shift from (quasi-) anaphoric control (Haug 2013) to functional control and thence to complete loss of argument structure;

d) demonstrate the advantages of such an account when compared to the derivational proposal of Grano (2015) which presupposes the presence of a silent HAVE head as the complement of ‘want’ verbs cross-linguistically.

Bybee, Joan, Revere Perkins & William Pagliuca. 1994. The Evolution of Grammar. Tense, Aspect, and Modality in the Languages of the World. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Bylin, Maria 2017. Hit och dit i prototypkategorin. Historien om viljas hjälpverbsstatus. In Emma Sköldberg, Maia Andréasson, Henrietta Adamsson Eryd, Filippa Lindahl, Sven Lindström, Julia Prentice & Malin Sandberg (eds) Svenskans beskrivning 35: Förhandlingar vid trettiofemte sammankomsten. Göteborg: Göteborgs Universitet. 67-80.

Grano, Thomas. 2015. Control and restructuring. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Haug, Dag. 2013. Partial control and anaphoric control in LFG. In Miriam Butt & Tracy Holloway King (eds), Proceedings of the LFG 2013 Conference. Stanford, CA: CSLI http://csli-publications.stanford.edu

12:00: Joey Lovestrand, University of Oxford: Barayin SVCs in LFG

As part of my dissertation (in progress), I provide a formal analysis of Barayin serial verb constructions (SVCs) in LFG. Barayin is a Chadic language spoken by about 5,000 people in Chad. There are four types of serial verb constructions. I analyze all four types as having identical c-structures and f-structure. They differ at the level of s-structure.

At c-structure, serial verbs are non-projecting verbs occurring at the left edge of the verb phrase, immediately before the main verb. Serial verbs do not make any contribution to f-structure. They have no PRED feature. At s-structure serial verbs contribute a PATH or MANNER feature, and functionally identify the argument(s) of the PATH or MANNER feature with an argument (or arguments) of the main verb. This is done with f-descriptions assuming the connected s-structure proposed by Asudeh and Giorgolo (2012).

Asudeh, Ash and Giorgolo, Gianluca "Flexible composition for optional and derived arguments." Proceedings of the LFG12 Conference. 2012.

12:30 - 2:00: Lunch

2:00: András Bárány and Irina Nikolaeva, SOAS: Proximate possessors in Tundra Nenets

Tundra Nenets has agreeing and non-agreeing lexical possessors. We analyse the distribution of agreeing lexical possessors in terms of obviation, arguing that such possessors are proximate and are not compatible with other proximate NPs in the clause. This pragmatic-semantic prominence correlates with a structurally prominent position of agreeing lexical possessors inside the possessive NP.

3:00: Rickard Ramhöj, University of Gothenburg: Pivots, topics and subjects - An analysis of it-extraposition in the history of English

The it-extraposition construction, i.e. when a clause-final propositional subclause cooccurs with a subject pronoun it, poses a number of interesting questions with respect to its historical development. In Old English, a subject it is present in about 20% of the cases when there is a clause-final propositional subclause and no agent argument; for Late Modern English, the percentage is about 90%. When a subject it is not present, a large proportion of the instances contains a preverbal experiencer argument, which in early English displays a number of subject properties (LFG-discussions in Allen 1995, Zimmerman 2015). There are however also instances without any preverbal argument. In my talk, I will discuss the historical development of the it-extraposition construction in terms of the argument structures of the predicates involved. I will also discuss the relationship between structural position, subjecthood and topichood at different stages in the history of English.

Allen, C. L. (1995), Case Marking and Reanalysis: Grammatical Relations from Old to Early Modern English, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Zimmerman, R. (2015), Early English clausal arguments of intransitive verbs: Subjects or associates of empty expletives?, Paper presented at the Symposium on the History of English Syntax 13 (SHES 13), Leiden, 16-17 May 2015.

4:00-4:15: Break

4:15: Richard Zimmermann, University of Geneva: Modelling syntactic change in LFG - Possessive have in American English

Possessive have changed its realization in a number of syntactic contexts, including negation (She hasn't a car > She doesn't have a car), inversion, VP-adjunct and VP ellipsis structures, between c. 1800-2000. I will demonstrate that these changes can be attributed to one underlying innovation, namely a change in have's syntactic category from I to V, by testing for a constant rate effect between the different contexts in a large body of text data. In the process, I will discuss several issues that arise for an LFG-based description of Modern English clause structure.

5:15: Planning for next time