Speaker: Oddur Snorrason (Queen Mary University of London)
Title: Subtraction in the Distribution of Auxiliaries
Time: Tuesday, November 26, 1pm – 2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract: Auxiliaries are known to arise either (i) with a certain inflectional category (Additive pattern), or (ii) in the combination of such categories (Overflow pattern; Bjorkman 2011). This talk is about a little-discussed third pattern where verbal inflectional information is lost in auxiliary formation: The Subtractive pattern. Based on a small survey of languages, I argue that the subtractive pattern reflects markedness-related dissimilation effects analogous to clitic reduction and deletion in Biscayan varieties of Basque (Arregi & Nevins 2012). The account is most naturally accommodated in theories where auxiliaries arise because of a morphological well-formedness condition (Cowper 2010, Bjorkman 2011) rather than due to c-selection (e.g. Pietraszko 2023).