29th South of England LFG Meeting
THIS MEETING WAS CANCELLED DUE TO THE CORONAVIRUS.
The 29th South of England LFG meeting, a student-oriented meeting for presentations and discussion of various topics from an LFG perspective, will be held on 14 March 2020 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 details:
SOAS, room G51 (ground floor towards the back of the building, down the corridor to the left past the lifts). PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS IS NOT THE USUAL ROOM.
For directions to SOAS see here: http://www.soas.ac.uk/visitors/location/maps/ (also see map opposite). To view any planned engineering works affecting your journey within London, click here.
Sign in at the reception when you arrive to get a visitor sticker that allows you to enter the SOAS main building.
Meeting agenda:
11:00-12:00: Agnieszka Patejuk, Oxford and Institute of Computer Science, Polish Academy of Sciences and Adam Przepiórkowski, University of Warsaw, Institute of Computer Science at the Polish Academy of Sciences, and Oxford: Coordinate structures without syntactic categories
Dalrymple (2017) proposes to encode syntactic categories, e.g., N, as feature matrices, e.g., [N+, V–, P–, Adj–, Adv–]. On this account, unlike category coordination has a category with multiple ‘+’-valued features, e.g., “a Republican and quite conservative” in “Pat became a Republican and quite conservative” (from Sag et al. 1985) gets the complex category [N+, V–, P–, Adj+, Adv–]. In this talk, we attempt to show that this solution does not extend to the full range of data, especially, to disjunctive specifications which refer not only to the syntactic category (as in the case of the disjunctive requirements of ‘become’ which expects its predicative argument to be either N or Adj), but which also make reference to morphosyntactic or lexical information encoded in f-structures, e.g., to grammatical case, idiosyncratic preposition or a specific complementiser. We propose an alternative analysis, in which syntactic category is a distributive feature of f-structures – rather than c-structures. On this analysis, unlike category coordination does not need – and does not have – any syntactic category.
12:00-12:30: Chit Fung Lam, University of Manchester: Control and finiteness in Mandarin Chinese
Control and complementation play a central role in LFG. For English and related languages, functional and anaphoric control are associated with non-finite subordinate clauses. Whether Chinese makes a distinction between finite and non-finite clauses is a controversial issue. In this talk, I examine the different diagnostic criteria for identifying functional and anaphoric control in Mandarin Chinese without resorting to the assumption of (non-)finiteness.
12:30-2:00: Lunch
2:00-3:00: Joey Lovestrand, SOAS: Complex predicates and connected s-structure
Lowe (2015) re-analyzes Hindi/Urdu complex predicates (Butt 2014, inter alia) in an approach that models “argument fusion” using glue semantics. Lowe’s analysis does not fully account for (very) complex predicates which have more than one light verb. Andrews (2018) proposes a solution which treats the f-structure of complex predicates as a hybrid object. I propose an alternative without hybrid objects, instead treating the main verb as a COMP/OBL containing no grammatical functions of its own. The light verb does not have a PRED, but can share the PRED value of its COMP/OBL (if necessary). This approach includes links between grammatical relations in f-structure and arguments in a complex s-structure using standard f-descriptions.
Andrews, A.D. 2018. Sets, heads and spreading in LFG. Journal of Language Modelling 6(1). 131–174.
Butt, M. 2014. Control vs. Complex Predication: Identifying Non-Finite Complements, Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, 32(1):165–190.
Lowe, J.J. 2015. Complex predicates: an LFG+glue analysis. Journal of Language Modelling 3(2). 413–462.
3:00-3:30: Roxanne Taylor, University of Manchester: Argument structure in the Old English noun phrase: methodology and data collection
3:30-3:45: break
3:45-4:45: Mike Franjieh, University of Surrey: Transitivity and secondary predicates in Fanbyak (Oceanic, Vanuatu)
This talk focusses on the difference between three distinct classes of verb in Fanbyak – (i) morphosyntactic and semantically intransitive verbs, (ii) morphosyntactic and semantically transitive verbs and (iii) morpho-syntactically intransitive yet semantically transitive verbs. I discuss the interesting interplay between these three verb classes, object incorporation and transitivity altering secondary predicates.
4:45-5:45: Miriam Butt, University of Konstanz: Figure and Ground in Argument Structure