Please join us Friday, November 5th at 3:30pm for our next talk of the 2021-2022 McGill Linguistics Colloquium Series. If you are planning to attend talks and have not yet registered, you can do so here (you only need to register once for the 2021-2022 year). After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.
Speaker: Heidi Harley (University of Arizona)
Abstract: Hiaki (Yaqui) exhibits an interesting formal overlap between nominalizations which create relative-clause like structures and nominalizations which create event nominals. The same nominalizer which usually derives a subject relative nominal also, when applied to an argumentless predicate such as a weather verb or an impersonal passive, derives an event nominal. I argue that this is because the event argument IS the ‘subject’ of an argumentless predicate, the only accessible argument for the nominalizer to reify. In the process of proposing a uniform semantics for the relative nominalizers and the event nominalizer, a detailed analysis of both is provided. The nominalizers are argued to select an AspP complement. In entity-referring relative nominals, null operator movement is involved; in the event-referring event nominals, no operator is needed or possible. The syntax and morphology of the relative nominalizers is worked out in detail, with particular attention to the genitive-marked subjects of object, oblique and locative relative nominals.