SE-LFG30 (30 October 2021, Oxford)

30th South of England LFG Meeting

The 30th South of England LFG Meeting, a student-orented meeting for presentations and discussion of various topics from an LFG perspective, will be held on 30 October 2021 at the Oriental Institute, University of Oxford from 1:00-4:30 PM. Contact Joey Lovestrand with any questions (jl119@soas.ac.uk).

Meeting agenda:

1:00 - 1:45 Chit Fung Lam (Lawrence)

A Data-driven Approach to Generalised Control Relations in a Discourse Pro-drop Language: Insights from a Parallel-correspondence System of Grammar

Abstract: In this talk, I present a typology of control relations attested in Mandarin Chinese – a “discourse pro-drop language”, which in general allows subjects and objects to be unexpressed (see e.g., Huang, 1984, 1989; Neeleman & Szendrői, 2007, 2008; Roberts & Holmberg, 2010). My talk adopts a broad definition of control, termed as “Generalised Control Relation” (cf. Huang, 1989). I illustrate how this notion of control is interpreted in an LFG-based parallel-correspondence architecture. My approach is data-driven, focusing on meticulous analysis of empirical evidence which has been obtained by applying a range of linguistic diagnostics. The systematic classification of control relations results in a Continuum of Control Force, which I argue has empirical significance for studying control relations in a discourse pro-drop language.

1:45 - 2:30 Agnieszka Patejuk

Case and agreement mismatches in Polish gapping

On the basis of data from Polish, this talk presents mismatches in structural case assignment and agreement (subject-verb, noun-adjective, numeral-noun) that may arise in gapping – a variety of coordination with ellipsis – and how such mismatches may be accounted for in a constraint-based theory such as LFG.

2:30 - 2:45 Tea Break

2:45 - 3:30 Roxanne Taylor

Noun phrase grammatical functions in contemporary LFG

This paper addresses the gains and challenges of reconciling FKMT (Findlay 2016, 2020) with nominal argument structure and nominal grammatical functions. Questions of using featural specification to create and identify grammatical functions, as per Sadler (2000) and Chisarik & Payne (2003); whether it is possible to add to the inventory of GFs to account for noun phrases, as Laczkó (2000); whether syntactic categories can be distinguished by GFs if a-structure is eradicated will be all considered. Reconciliation between early work on nominal a-structure and FKMT is possible but requires a reassessment of understanding of the GFs POSS and SUBJ close to the indeterminacy in Markantonatou (1995).

3:30 - 4:15 Joseph Lovestrand

C-structure to s-structure to f-structure

This talk will present some initial exploration of the consequences of proposing an LFG architecture in which c-structure projects s-structure which projects f-structure (c-s-f). This reverses the typically assumed order of the projection architecture, c-(a)-f-s, but preserves some of the insights from proposals for a level of a-structure (e.g. Butt et al 1997) while avoiding duplicating information in the representation (Asudeh & Giorgolo 2012). The main consequence of this architectural design is that it does not seem practical (or possible?) to annotate phrase structure rules with grammatical functions. Instead, phrase structure rules could be annotated with s-structure arguments, which are linked to f-structure grammatical functions via templates of possible mapping relationships (as in Findlay 2016).

4:15 - 4:30 Planning the next SE-LFG meeting