When: Wednesday, October 9th, 3–4pm in room 117
Who: Gretchen McCulloch
What: Finals in Mi’gmaq: The case of -asi
Abstract: Finals are a type of morpheme found in Mi’gmaq and other Algonquian languages that occur at the right edge of a verb stem, before agreement and other inflectional suffixes. Minimally, finals indicate the transitivity of a verb and the animacy of its absolutive argument, but they may also have a variety of other light-verb-like and valence-changing meanings. The final -asi in Mi’gmaq and its variants -a’si, -as’, -a’s’, and -si has traditionally been described as a reflexive (Inglis 1986). Based on new data from my work with speakers and a dictionary, I argue that -asi is not only reflexive, but that it can be better analyzed as a middle voice marker by the ten middle situation types of Kemmer (1993).