The Syntax-Semantics reading group and MULL-lab will be meeting on Wednesday, December 6th at 4pm in Rm. 117 of the McGill Linguistics department, with a Zoom room open for those unable to join in person.
This week, Will will be presenting a MULL-themed talk entitled: ‘Diagnosing Prepositions: Decomposing Path in White Hmong’.
This talk investigates the syntactic category of so-called “path predicates” in White Hmong, which appear to have both verbal and prepositional uses. I argue that the distribution of these predicates, including certain configurational effects that they show, can be captured by assuming (i) that these predicates can lexicalize spans that include both v∘ and material within its prepositional complement (cf. Son & Svenonius 2008), and (ii) that the (prepositional) path domain decomposes into at least three heads: Route∘, Source∘, and Goal∘ (Pantcheva 2011). This demonstrates the need both for spanning and for the decomposition of the prepositional phrase even in highly isolating languages.
Please register in advance HERE to receive the Zoom link. You can also share this link with others who may want to join.