SE-LFG25 (26/05/2018, SOAS)

25th South of England LFG Meeting

The 25th 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, 26 May 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:

10:00-11:00: Agnieszka Patejuk, Oxford and Institute of Computer Science, Polish Academy of Sciences: Incorporating conjunctions in Polish

This talk presents an implemented LFG analysis of incorporating conjunctions in Polish which, despite their non-standard c-structure placement, being potentially deeply embedded inside the structure of a different constituent, successfully accounts for their f-structure, maintaining parallelism with sentences without incorporation.

11:00-12:00: Kersti Börjars and John Payne, Manchester: Licensing attributive adjective marking

A number of linguists take the modifying, rather than the predicative, use of adjectives to be unmarked (e.g Croft, 1991; Bhat, 1994). In this paper we will argue that — at least in the languages we consider — it is the predicative adjective that is, in some sense, unmarked. We illustrate with examples from Old Persian, which has an overt syntactic attributive licenser, and Iranian Talishi, which has a morphological licenser. We provide an LFG analysis of adjectival attribution that is based on its affinity with relative attribution, an analysis supported by the licenser's historical origin (at least in some instances) as a relativiser.

12:00-1:30: Lunch

1:30-2:00: Hannah Booth, Manchester: ‘Subjectless’ constructions and expletives: syntactic change in Icelandic

In this paper, I examine the properties of various types of ‘subjectless’ construction in the history of Icelandic using Kibort’s Mapping Theory (e.g. Kibort 2007; Kibort & Maling 2015) and propose a diachronic account for the emergence of the expletive það in such contexts.

References:

Kibort, Anna. 2007. Extending the applicability of Lexical Mapping Theory. In: Butt, Miriam & Tracy Holloway King (eds.) Proceedings of the LFG'07 Conference, Stanford University. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications. 250-270.

Kibort, Anna & Joan Maling. 2015. Modelling the syntactic ambiguity of the active vs passive impersonal in LFG. In: Butt, Miriam & Tracy Holloway King (eds.) Proceedings of the LFG'15 Conference, Waseda University, Tokyo. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications. 145-165.

2:00-3:00: Adam Przepiórkowski, Polish Academy of Sciences and University of Warsaw: A unified analysis of ad-verbal and ad-nominal adverbials

3:00-3:15: Break

3:15-4:15: Kersti Börjars, Chris Hicks, and John Payne, Manchester: Interdependencies in Chinese noun phrases

We propose an LFG analysis of the structure of Chinese noun phrases using a c-structure involving a spine of coheads (D - Q - Class - N) which is more complex than the c-structure typically assumed within LFG, but which is motivated by restrictions on ordering of elements and on modification at each level. The mutual interdependence of quantifiers and classifiers, on the other hand, is a consequence of the f-structure features assigned to these. The analysis therefore exploits the LFG distinction between a syntactically motivated c-structure and an independent level of f-structure.

4:15-4:45: Jamie Findlay, Oxford: Lexicalised LFG

In standard LFG, lexical entries correspond only to a single word form, and the only c-structure information they contain is the category of that word form. In this talk, I give two reasons (the treatment of multiword expressions and the advantages of a so-called lexicalised grammar) to think this might not be the best way of doing things, and give a formal means of encoding larger stretches of c-structure within a lexical entry. I argue that this actually gives a neater theory, even in the simple cases.

4:45-5:00: Planning for next time