The Syntax-Semantics Group will be meeting on Monday, February 24 at 3pm in Room 117 of the McGill linguistics department. Online participants can join with this link: https://mcgill.zoom.us/meeting/register/16ZiB1ATRMGSUxbkGOJGvw.
Ina Zeng (McGill University) will be discussing “Morphological Realization of Presuppositionality in Igala.” Here is Ina’s abstract:
In this talk I discuss the morphological realization of presuppositionality in Igala (Niger-Congo) through the morpheme ama. On a bare noun, ama contributes plural interpretation. However, when ama occurs in a nominal modified by an overt plural numeral, its distribution and semantic contribution changes. Human referents modified by plural numerals must always be marked with ama. With a non-human referent, ama “optionally” appears on the nominal. I present evidence that this “optionality” can be better characterized as indicating a presupposition of the existence of the referent. Crosslinguistically, marking presuppositionality has been connected to differential object marking (DOM). In Igala, presuppositional ama appears with both subjects and objects. Importantly, the conditions required to license ama do not differ between subjects and objects—the presence of an overt plural numeral is only prerequisite for ama. Igala presents a novel case of variation in what kinds of structural elements are used to mark presuppositionality, and in which positions marking appears. The data presents a problem for existing feature hierarchies used in analyses of DOM (Kalin 2018). Current analyses do not predict contrastive behaviour between morphologically marked and unmarked nominals, and cannot account for how morphological number would affect the distribution and interpretation of an element.