McLing is pleased to announce that Jonathan Bobaljik will be visiting Montreal next week, sponsored by the Concordia LSA and McSIRG.
What: Mini workshop: “Dependent Case and Case-dependent Agreement” (presenting in part joint work with Mark Baker)
Coordinates: Thursday January 29th, 5:30–7pm in Linguistics 117; to be followed by a dinner reception in the Linguistics Lounge
In this tutorial/workshop, we’ll work through some of the evidence for treating case on an NPs as primarily reflecting syntactic configuration (transitivity / whether there is another NP in the same domain, Marantz 1991, Baker to appear) rather than by a relationship to a designated functional head (as in Chomsky 1981 et seq). Time and audience interest permitting, we will look at some of the following:
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critical examination of arguments that ergative case is ‘inherent’ (tied to a theta-role assigning head)
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arguments that case and agreement are not ‘two sides of the same coin’ but are distinct grammatical operations
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arguments that agreement depends (imperfectly) on case (Bobaljik 2008, Baker 2008), with attention to putative counter-examples
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different distribution of ‘active’ patterns in case vs. agreement (and the implications of this for the questions above)
Please RSVP to Jessica if you are interested in attending.
Information for the colloquium at Concordia is as follows:
