The Syntax-Semantics Group will be meeting on Monday, April 14 at 3pm in Room 117 of the McGill linguistics department. This meeting is the final regularly scheduled meeting of McGill’s Winter 2025 term. Online participants can join with this link: https://mcgill.zoom.us/meeting/register/16ZiB1ATRMGSUxbkGOJGvw.
Professor James Crippen (McGill) will be giving a presentation with the title “Optional ergative is subject focus in Tlingit.” Here is James’s abstract:
Tlingit has been described as having free word order (actually phrase order). This freedom crucially depends on the presence of -ch on a subject DP, a fact silently assumed in previous discussions. Without this -ch on the subject only SOV order is grammatical, implying that SOV is the basic word order in common with all other Na-Dene languages. The subject DP can have -ch but there is no distinct marking of object DPs so -ch has been described as ergative case. Since -ch need not occur, it appears to be an “optional ergative” as reported in a few other languages around the world. But case is not normally optional, and also -ch is always interpreted as focus on the subject which is unexpected for case marking. I argue that Tlingit -ch is not in fact ergative case, nor is it an indicator of the agent thematic role. Instead, -ch is the realization of a functional head in the left periphery that takes CP as its complement. The presence of -ch triggers movement of the subject DP out of the CP and up to FP. This analysis derives all non-SOV phrase orders as remnant movement to the peripheries driven by information structure. It also captures the apparent cataphora reported in earlier research, explains the disappearance of a- 3>3 agreement in some configurations with -ch, and the retention of a- for DP pronouns with -ch. Sentences where -ch appears on other phrases are the same lexical item merged as P selecting DP for instrument applicatives and CP for explanation clauses, both of which can cooccur with subject DP -ch.