[Ling-Talk] Reminder: TOMORROW 12:30pm, Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine

[Pei-Yi]

Dear all,

Reminding you that Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine will be speaking at the Ling-Talk@NTHU tomorrow. See below for the talk information. Thanks.

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. 

Your Ling-Talk@NTHU organizer, 

Pei-Yi