This week’s syntax-semantics meeting will take place Friday, February 17th at 12pm in room 117. Willie will present ongoing work about Relative (pro)nominals in Kirundi.
Bantu’s distinct subject relative clause morphology has commonly been explained as the result of ‘anti-agreement effects’ driven by A’-movement. Data from Kirundi headless relative clauses (HRCs) suggests that an A’-driven account does not hold. I argue that these constructions are not the result of a relative clause A’-dependency but instead of a special type of deverbal nominalization akin to the composition of pronouns such as English ‘one’. In this talk, I present data on the distribution of HRCs and related pro-NPs which provides insight on how to classify them syntactically and semantically. Specifically, these data highlight unexpected ways in which the expression of existence and referentiality interact with predication in the language.