Join us for the Final Ling-tea of the semester!
Who: Douglas Gordon
When: Tuesday April 26th 1:00-2:00
Where: Ling 117
What: Animate-inanimate coordination in Mi’gmaq: consequences for conjunction reduction
There are two possible analyses of DP coordination: that apparent DP coordination is underlyingly TP coordination and material has been elided or simply that two DPs are coordinated. Conjunction reduction (CR) is the ellipsis of a repeated subject and verb in all but one of a set of conjuncts and can be used to derive DP coordination from underlying TP coordination.I argue that CR is only an available mechanism in Mi’gmaq when plain DP coordination is not possible. I discuss this issue in reference to like- and mixed-animacy coordination, since transitive verbs must agree with the animacy of their internal argument. I show that in cases where the conjuncts match in animacy, CR would fail to derive grammatical agreement on the verb. I also show, however, that CR may be an available mechanism in cases where animacy of the conjuncts does not match.