This week, Benjamin Oldham will be presenting his ongoing work on applicatives in Chichewa. The presentation is titled: Object marking in Chichewa: A diagnostic for the syntax of applicatives. A short abstract is below.
This presentation uses object marking in Chichewa as a diagnostic for the syntactic structure of applicatives, which are double object constructions. In different types of applicatives, the object available for object marking may be either the direct object or the applied object, to the exclusion of the other. I show that object marking targets the syntactically highest object, and that Chichewa makes the distinction between a high and low applicative. This syntactic model is compatible with other observed behaviors of object marking crosslinguistically.
We will meet at our usual meeting time of 12-1pm in Linguistics, Room 117.
All are welcome!