The Syntax-Semantics reading group and MULL-lab will be meeting on Thursday, February 22nd at 1pm in Rm. 117 of the McGill Linguistics department, with a Zoom room open for those unable to join in person.
This week, Terrance will be presenting a MULL-themed talk entitled: ‘Two Optional Past Tenses in Kanien’kéha’. The abstract is below:
This talk focuses on my on-going work on Kanien’kéha temporal reference. Kanien’kéha verbs are typically unmarked for tense, but two suffixes have been identified across the Northern Iroquoian languages as potentially contributing temporal restrictions in the same way as obligatory tense morphemes in tensed languages (e.g., English). I discuss these two suffixes, especially in light of cross-linguistic work on optionality of tense and recent work on cessation/termination implicatures that arise with optional past suffixes across languages.
Please register in advance HERE to receive the Zoom link. You can also share this link with others who may want to join.