SE-LFG26 (27/10/2018, SOAS)

26th South of England LFG Meeting

The 26th 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, 27 October 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: John Lowe, Oxford: Causative alternations in Siraiki [joint work with Ali Birahimani]

Siraiki is a major but understudied modern Indo-Aryan (IA) language, spoken mainly in central Pakistan. It has three distinct causative suffixes, and a construction that we label the 'periphrastic pseudo-causative'. We investigate how these four formations differ, and present an LFG analysis which involves some changes to the standard linking theory approach to complex predicates.

12:00-12:30: Amanda Thomas, Oxford: The historical development of grammatical features of polite pronouns

I present a new analysis of the diachronic development of some second person polite pronouns in European languages, focusing on the grammatical features of person and number. Some of these pronouns derive from grammaticalised third person noun phrases, and have aspects of both second person and third person agreement. In my case studies, a variety of complex agreement patterns are seen, which I identify as mismatch phenomena. I demonstrate that these mismatches can be accounted for by adapting the existing concepts of INDEX and CONCORD in an LFG account of the pronouns’ development.

12:30-2:00: Lunch

2:00-3:00: Charlotte Hemmings, Oxford: The Subject GF in Western Austronesian

In LFG, grammatical functions like ‘subject’ are typically taken to be primitives of the theory and treated as both fundamental and universal. However, there is a long-standing debate as to whether the subject function is really applicable to Western Austronesian (WAn) languages on account of their relatively unusual symmetrical voice systems and the so-called split in typical subject properties between the actor semantic role and the argument privileged by the voice morphology. In this paper, I address the debate in relation to empirical data from the Kelabit language of Northern Sarawak. I argue that the Kelabit data provides a number of arguments for identifying the privileged argument as subject and the actor as an object in non‑actor voice constructions. This has important implications for the treatment of subjects cross-linguistically, Western Austronesian verbal morphology and linking theories.

3:00-4:00: Steven Kaye, Surrey: Unusual agreement in Nakh-Daghestanian

In many Nakh-Daghestanian languages, agreement is regularly found not only on the ‘usual suspects’ such as adjectives and verbs, but much more widely: depending on the language, adverbs, postpositions, personal pronouns, discourse particles and even nominal case endings may alter in form to mark agreement with an absolutive argument. Focusing especially on the Andi dialects, this talk will present data from across the family illustrating this typologically unusual behaviour, which poses a challenge for syntactic theories of agreement in any current framework.

4:00-4:15: break

4:15-5:15: Agnieszka Patejuk, Oxford and Institute of Computer Science, Polish Academy of Sciences: Predicative constructions with infinitival and clausal subjects in Polish [joint work with Adam Przepiórkowski]

This paper offers a formal syntactic LFG/XLE analysis of predicative constructions in Polish (with and without a copula), whose subject (the item predicated of) is a clause: an infinitival phrase or a complementiser phrase. Apart from discussing nominal and adjectival predicative items in this context, this paper argues for the existence of predicative adverbs.

5:15: planning for next meeting