Speaker: Keely New (MIT)
Title: Voice and the variable position of auxiliaries in colloquial Jakartan Indonesian
Time: Tuesday, September 19th, 1pm – 2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract: Colloquial Jakartan Indonesian (CJI) displays a voice system typical of Austronesian languages: in each clause there is one argument (the pivot) that occupies the sentence-initial position, and the choice of this argument affects verbal morphology as well as the word order of other arguments. The pivot is also the only argument that may undergo A-extraction (the pivot-only restriction). In this talk, I discuss a potential violation of the pivot-only restriction in CJI and show how it presents a challenge for standard, locality-based approaches. I argue that this violation is only apparent by proposing that there are multiple position positions for auxiliaries in the structure.