Whamit!

The Weekly Newsletter of MIT Linguistics

Elsewhere 10/30 - Yvette Yi-Chi Wu (Harvard)

Speaker: Yvette Yi-Chi Wu (Harvard)

Title: Verb classes and affix ordering in Seediq

Time: Thursday, October 30th, 5pm – 6pm

Location: 32-D769



Abstract: This talk looks at verbal morphology in Seediq, with supplementary data from other Formosan languages. I will focus on the ordering of “voice” morphology with respect to derivational and TAM morphology, which allows us to examine the interactions of infixation, reduplication, stress-conditioned suppletion, and more. I show that the actor voice (AV) infix is located in the middle field (below perfective Asp and above Voice), which goes against theories where voice is high (e.g. in T or C). I also attribute apparent allomorphy of AV to regular argument structural morphology in Seediq (cf. Ross 1995, Chen 2020), and discuss the implications this has on verb classes and (anti-)causative structures.