MULL-lab will be meeting this Tuesday, November 8th at 3:30 pm. Meetings will take place in Rm. 002 of the Linguistics department, with a Zoom room open for those unable to join us in person.
This week, Willie will be presenting a talk entitled: ‘Re-assessing Relative Clauses in Kirundi’. The abstract is below.
Many Bantu languages are said to display anti-agreement in subject-relative clauses. Past work has attributed this to feature impoverishment as a result of A’-movement. In Kirundi, however, headed relative clauses exhibit the same agreement as matrix clauses while their headless counterparts exhibit ‘alternative’ agreement morphology, suggesting that A’-movement is not the only factor at play. In this talk, I explore Kirundi’s full paradigm of constructions with relative-clause interpretations and make an initial proposal to account for the unexpected agreement pattern: 1) Kirundi’s headless constructions are not, in fact, relative clauses, but deverbal nominalizations, and 2) matrix clause agreement and relative clause agreement both result from A’-movement driven by special properties of the Bantu subject position.
Please register in advance HERE to receive the Zoom link. You can also share this link with others who may want to join.