The Syntax-Semantics Group will hold its final meeting of 2025 on Tuesday, December 2, at 3-4pm in Room 117 of the McGill linguistics department. Online participants can join with this link: https://mcgill.zoom.us/meeting/register/bQ4IXlJxTTShVcMHOosNtQ
David Avellan-Hultman (McGill) will be presenting “Revisiting finite ha-omission in Swedish.” Here is the abstract:
In this talk, I revisit the observation that the Swedish perfect auxiliary ha (‘have’) can be omitted from finite embedded clauses with no change in meaning, leaving only the nonfinite main verb to express perfect aspect. This pattern has received some theoretical attention, most notably by Julien (2002). Julien claims that ha-omission is impossible next to a subject trace, a judgement that has been empirically challenged in other literature. In my talk I argue against the core of Julien’s analysis, but I believe that she was justified in bringing attention to the subject trace data. I report preliminary findings from a corpus study on the frequency of ha-omission, showing that it occurs much less frequently next to subject traces than in contexts where it is uncontroversially permitted, confirming Julien’s intuition that something is different about the subject trace configuration, even if it admits ha-omission for at least some speakers. I conclude the talk by discussing some possible interpretations and syntactic explanations of this data.