SE-LFG27 (09/02/2019, SOAS)

27th South of England LFG Meeting

The 27th 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, 9 February 2019 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: Oliver Bond, Surrey: Clause level features

Conventional theories of agreement and government cannot always adequately account for the distribution of morphosyntactic feature values across multiple targets/governees within the same clause. In this paper, I examine the evidence surrounding the existence of 'clause-level' features, drawing on data from Australian and Nakh-Daghestanian languages.

12:00-12:45: Kersti Börjars, Manchester: Noun phrases and GFs

Noun phrases have not been quite as well studied in LFG as clauses, though there are notable exceptions to this generalization (e.g. articles in Butt & King (eds) 2003, agreement especially under co-ordination (King and Dalrymple 2004), argument structure of noun phrases (Laszkó 2007), and too many others to mention here). In this discussion paper, I would like to consider the role of grammatical functions in noun phrases. In nominalisations that closely parallel a verbal version such as the well-known example in (1), it may seem clear that the grammatical relations should also be mirrored.

(1) a. the army’s destruction of the city

b. The army destroyed the city.

A possessor functions much like a subject in relation to some binding properties, so the assumption that the army is a SUBJ in (1a) to parallel (1b) seems reasonable. But what do we do with of the city, is it really a PP OBJ? Another issue arises with (2a), where a comparison with (1b) would lead to the conclusion that the possessor is an OBJ. Or the famously ambiguous (or vague) example in (2b).

(2) a. the city’s destruction

b. Oscar’s photograph

In the LFG literature, noun-phrase specific functions have been proposed in order to distinguish functions in the noun phrase from those at clause level, for instance POSS, SPEC and NCOMP. In this slot, I will present some further data with reference to the literature, but most of all I am interested in a discussion of the role of grammatical relations in the noun phrase, how important are the parallels with verbal constituents, can data from languages not considered in this literature can help us make choices etc.

12:45: Lunch

2:00-3:00: Ryo Otoguro, Waseda University: Formulating controller selection in non-canonical agreement

Based on the empirical findings on a range of agreement patterns found in the literature, I argue that distinct principles are working behind agreement controller selection depending on the characteristics of clause structure across languages. I particularly focus on so-called proxy agreement and left-edge agreement and show how controller selection for those non-canonical agreement can be formulated in LFG.

3:00-3:30: Alex Biswas, Oxford: French verbal periphrasis: composé and surcomposé tenses

An analysis of stacked periphrases found in French which makes use of m-structure to encode the collocational requirements of each component of the periphrase. Unlike many previous analyses of periphrasis, the morphological component still produces single words, but encodes m-structure constraints on those words which describe the relationship between the auxiliary and lexical elements of the periphrase.

3:30: Planning for next time