The Syntax-Semantics Group will hold its next meeting on Thursday, April 9th, at 2-3pm in Room 002 of the McGill linguistics department. Online participants can join with this link: https://mcgill.zoom.us/j/84180431566
Brandon Chaperon will be presenting “Generic argument-structure head in the Wolof causative-benefactive syncretism.” Here is the abstract:
This work provides an account for the crosslinguistically prevalent phenomenon of “causative-applicative syncretisms” (e.g., Jerro, 2017; Franco, 2019). Wolof (Atlantic; Niger-Congo) has a morphological syncretism between causatives and benefactives. In both cases, the verbal suffix –al is used: (i) a causative interpretation arises when it is added to clauses without an external argument (e.g., unaccusatives) and (ii) a benefactive interpretation arises when it is added to clauses containing an external argument (e.g., transitives). I analyze both clauses as encoding a causal relation between two events (Parsons, 1990; Pylkkänen, 2008). Given that the suffix used in both cases (i) co-occurs with the addition of an argument, (ii) contributes bi-eventive causative semantics, and (iii) is homophonous, I propose a unified analysis for treating –al as the spellout of a single generic argument-structure-manipulating head. This echoes Wood and Marantz’s (2017) proposal that heads involved in argument structure — like v, Voice, Appl, and P — can be reduced to a single head: i*; syntactic features are unnecessary when syntactic structure already reflects interpretative differences. I thus propose that –al can be treated as the spellout of i* in both causative and benefactive environments, which receives its interpretation via contextual allosemy.