The Syntax-Semantics Group will be meeting on Monday, April 7 at 3pm in Room 117 of the McGill linguistics department. Online participants can join with this link: https://mcgill.zoom.us/meeting/register/16ZiB1ATRMGSUxbkGOJGvw.
Laurestine Bradford (McGill) will be discussing “So many ways to be done: Culmination and maximality in Tlingit.” Here is Laurestine’s abstract:
Tlingit perfectives do not generally entail culmination of the event they describe. To state unambiguously that an event culminated, one adds the preverbal clitic yan. However, culmination can only be expressed this way for certain kinds of verbs with clear associated scales. With other verbs, yan has a range of meanings that do not seem to involve event completion per se. Laurestine will present possible and impossible uses of yan and ideas toward an analysis in terms of maximality on scales. Of relevance will be implicit scales of change, pseudoincorporation, and how agentivity affects aspectual class.