The Syntax-Semantics reading group and MULL-lab will be meeting on Thursday, April 11th at 1pm in Rm. 117 of the McGill Linguistics department, with a Zoom room open for those unable to join in person.
This week, Chase will be presenting a MULL-themed talk entitled: ‘Stowaway nominals: Incorporation and nPs in Kanien’kéha’. The abstract is below:
Northern Iroquoian languages are widely known for their productive noun incorporation phenomena. Most sentences in Kanien’kéha (Mohawk; Northern Iroquoian) have two variants: a variant where the noun is incorporated into the verb, and a variant where the noun occurs external to the verb. Previous syntactic analyses of noun incorporation in Kanien’kéha (e.g., Baker 1988, 1996, DeCaire et al. 2017, Renard 2023) have relied on the intuition that a derivational relationship underlies the two variants. I will argue that an account relying on such a derivational relationship cannot account for crucial facts, and that the themes of the two variants are generated differently. Specifically, external nominals are not generated as themes at all but must be “stowed away” into the derivation by generating as the inalienable possessors of “dummy” incorporated roots.
Please register in advance HERE to receive the Zoom link. You can also share this link with others who may want to join