Speaker: Giovani Roversi (MIT)
Title: Applicative left behind?
Time: Tuesday, September 15, 1:00pm – 2pm
Location: 32-D461
I will present you some curious data from Äiwoo that Ive been banging my head on for a while. We will see a construction that functionally speaking seems to be a relative clear case of an applicative (i.e., it adds one DP argument to the argument structure of the verb, one that wouldve otherwise had to be expressed as a PP). However, the way its morphologically realized is rather puzzling, because its nowhere near where applicatives typically are found. Given what they do syntactically, applicative heads are usually in the lower theta domain of the clause (i.e., within vP/VoiceP). Therefore, by the Mirror Principle (Baker 1988)s terms and conditions, applicative morphemes should be very close to the verb stem and indeed they are, in most (all?) cases I know of. However, in the Äiwoo case, the particle that marks this applicative construction is realized somewhere else entirely. I will discuss a couple of hypotheses about what we could be looking at, and where they break. Put on your creative syntactician hats, and help me out!