[Ling-Talk] July 11 (Wednesday, 12:30~14:00), Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine

[Pei-Yi]

Dear all,

The summer break has started now. I hope you all will have a great vacation.

This summer, we are glad to have Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine as our guest speaker. Michael is now studying for his PhD in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His major research interests include syntax/semantics interface and computational linguistics, focusing on Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, and Mayan languages. See below for the talk information. Thanks.

Your Ling-Talk@NTHU organizer, 

Pei-Yi

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Guest speaker: Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

Time: 12:30 pm - 14:00 pm

Date: July 11, 2012 (Wednesday)

Venue: Room C519, CHSS 

Title: Kaqchikel Agent Focus: new evidence from multiple extraction constructions

Abstract:

Agent Focus (AF) in Mayan languages is a morphological change to transitive verbs which is traditionally described as obligatory whenever a subject is A’-extracted. In this talk I present evidence from my ongoing fieldwork on Kaqchikel (a Mayan language of Guatemala) that AF morphology does not simply appear when the subject of a transitive verb is A’-extracted. Rather, AF morphology occurs when the subject of a transitive verb moves to a particular, immediately preverbal position. This can be shown by a careful look at sentences involving multiple A’-extractions to the same verbal periphery. I will discuss what this might tell us about the nature of AF and argue against recent Case-based approaches to AF (Coon, Mateo Pedro, Preminger, ms; Assmann et al, 2012) for Kaqchikel.