{"id":15937,"date":"2023-11-06T06:08:00","date_gmt":"2023-11-06T11:08:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/whamit.mit.edu\/?p=15937"},"modified":"2023-11-06T06:08:00","modified_gmt":"2023-11-06T11:08:00","slug":"syntax-square-11-7-magdalena-lohninger-and-yiannis-katochoritis-mit-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/2023\/11\/06\/syntax-square-11-7-magdalena-lohninger-and-yiannis-katochoritis-mit-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Syntax Square 11\/7 - Magdalena Lohninger and Yiannis Katochoritis (MIT)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Speaker: <\/strong> Magdalena Lohninger and Yiannis Katochoritis (MIT)
Title: <\/strong>It\u0092s getting out of control! \u0096 Control, the A\/?-distinction and the subjecthood of pivots in Austronesian languages
Time: <\/strong>Tuesday, November 7th, 1pm - 2pm
Location: <\/strong>32-D461

Abstract: <\/strong>Control has long been employed as diagnostic of subjecthood: in an active embedded clause, the controllee should invariably correspond to the agent qua external argument. Yet, the very notion of subjecthood breaks down in Austronesian-type voice systems where one argument is promoted to \u0093pivot\u0094 and triggers a particular morphological form on the verb without altering its valency: subject properties are distributed between the agent irrespective of pivothood, and the pivot irrespective of ?-role, though not in a uniform manner (Schachter 1976; Guilfoyle et al. 1992).<\/p>\n

The status of Austronesian voice-marking has been subsumed under three syntactic analyses: (i) pivots are established in vP\/VoiceP via a process of object shift and subsequent ?-Agree reflecting structural case, ?-role or extraction site; (ii) voice-marking reflects absolutive case assignment in a (split-)ergative system; (iii) pivots are (hanging or internal) topics.<\/p>\n

We examine this debate on the basis of control structures, where Austronesian languages are divided into two types: type A, in which control targets the pivot (e.g., Malagasy, Acehnese), versus type B, in which control targets the external argument irrespective of voice-marking (e.g., Tagalog, Madurese). The picture gets murkier through the existence of embedded voice restructuring, default uses of Agent Voice morphology, backwards and crossed control configurations, and restrictions on matrix-embedded Voice matching.<\/p>\n

At the same time, Austronesian pivots differ with respect to the definiteness\/ specificity restriction and A\/?-related properties such as anaphor binding. Particularly the latter forms two types of languages: type C, in which pivots reconstruct (e.g., Malagasy, Tagalog), versus type D, in which promotion to pivot feeds binding (e.g., Acehnese).<\/p>\n

Given that types A & B of control do not fully overlap with types C & D of binding, we delve into the properties of pivots on a language-specific basis, and suggest that their A\/?-nature is neither uniform nor absolute, but spreads over a continuum: some pivots are more A-like elements, some are more ?-elements, and some are mixed, each determined by the type of features involved in the derivation of voice-marking. Such differences might stem from a diachronic transition from ?-to-A syntax of voice marking (see also Chen & Patrianto 2023), each possibly correlating with several aspects of the clausal structure, such as word order, position of the non-pivot agent and allomorphy.<\/p>\n

We conclude that the notion of \u0093pivot\u0094 might be a structural epiphenomenon and subject to variation, in which case a uniform syntactic analysis of voice marking should be untenable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Speaker: Magdalena Lohninger and Yiannis Katochoritis (MIT)Title: It\u0092s getting out of control! \u0096 Control, the A\/?-distinction and the subjecthood of pivots in Austronesian languagesTime: Tuesday, November 7th, 1pm - 2pmLocation: 32-D461Abstract: Control has long been employed as diagnostic of subjecthood: in an active embedded clause, the controllee should invariably correspond to the agent qua external […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15937","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-announcements"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15937","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15937"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15937\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15937"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15937"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15937"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}