Speaker: Bethany Lochbihler
Title: Complex Person Encoding in Cyclic Agree
Location: 1085 Dr. Penfield, room 117
Time: Thursday 11/17, 12:00–1:30
This paper accounts for the full Inverse System paradigm in Ojibwe (Central Algonquian), unifying it with morphology from other verbal paradigms using the notion of Cyclic Agree (Béjar & Rezac 2009) to license Person (π) features. I present a detailed π-feature organization, represented in a geometry defined by entailment present as a complex probe on v to encode Person Hierarchy effects. I revise Béjar & Rezac (2009) to obviate certain empirical and mechanical issues and better account for the data. Further, I account for a mismatch between syntactic transitivity and intransitive marking in Ojibwe, and Person restrictions on Theme arguments in ditransitives, which directly extends to Person restrictions in unrelated languages (e.g. Romance, Chinook, Icelandic). This proposal gives a new view on feature organization and valuation in the syntactic derivation, without impoverishing the morphosyntactic features.