MULL-lab will be meeting this Tuesday, March 21st 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, James will be presenting a talk entitled:’Stative marking in Tlingit: Evidence for the complexity of states’ based on work with Seth Cable (UMass).
Stative predicates in Tlingit are more structurally complex than is traditionally assumed for states cross-linguistically. The stative prefix in Tlingit distinguishes a certain subclass of states, specifically those which Maienborn (2005) has identified as “D-states”. Maienborn’s K-states are also represented in Tlingit, but unlike D-states they refuse a stative prefix despite being semantically stative. This surprisingly goes against Maienborn’s prediction that D-states are simpler and so less marked than K-states. Furthermore, the K-states are inflectionally defective, being licit only in the imperfective aspect, whereas the D-states are fully productive. We review the distinction between D-states and K-states and illustrate the morphological contrast in Tlingit along with some potentially crosslinguistic diagnostics that align with the morphology. We critique existing approaches to the semantic formalization of D-states and K-states, and using Tlingit as a particularly sensitive laboratory for their analysis we suggest some new directions for the analysis of their compositionality.
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