MULL-lab will be meeting this Tuesday, March 7th at 3:00 pm. Meetings take place in Rm. 002 of the McGill Linguistics department, with a Zoom room open for those unable to join in person.
This week, Terrance will be presenting a talk entitled:’Non-verbal clauses in Kirundi: Focus and non-verbal predicates’. The abstract is below.
One strategy for expressing focus in Kirundi is an A-bar fronting construction, obligatorily accompanied by a sentence-initial particle ni. In this presentation, I first establish the A-bar movement properties of these constructions and put forward data which shows that A-bar fronting has an interpretive effect, namely that of exhaustive identification of the fronted constituent. In the remainder of the talk, I propose an analysis wherein the particle which obligatorily accompanies this fronting, ni, is a Pred head. Support for this analysis comes from its additional distribution in contexts of non-verbal predication with no additional (verbal) functional material. In other words, I propose that the matrix clause of Kirundi clefts is syntactically highly reduced. The upshot of this is a more fine-grained view of what clefts (as well as non-cleft focus constructions) can look like: clefts with syntactically verbal copulas are symmetric in that there are two full clauses; clefts with syntactically non-verbal copulas like Kirundi are asymmetric in that the matrix predicate is syntactically deficient.
Please register in advance HERE to receive the Zoom link. You can also share this link with others who may want to join.