Lisa Travis (Emeritus Professor, McGill) will be presenting a talk “Voice Restructuring in Austronesian.” The meeting will take place on Monday, October 28 at 3pm in Room 002 of the McGill linguistics department. Lisa’s abstract is below:
The talk will be an overview of a book in progress. To account for constructions like Der Traktor und der Lastwagen wurden zu reparieren versucht (literally: ‘The tractor and the truck were tried to repair’), Wurmbrand and Shimamura (2017)* propose certain mechanisms of Voice Restructuring. To explain (i) why the agent of the matrix verb and the embedded verb must be the same and (ii) why passivizing the matrix verb forces long A-movement of the embedded object to the matrix subject position, they posit that the Voice head in the complement clause to restructuring verbs like want, try, begin, etc. has two unvalued features, iϕ and Voice, that must be valued by the features in the matrix Voice head. In this book (there are nine co-authors) we test the Voice Restructuring proposal on three Austronesian languages (Indonesian, Tagalog, and Malagasy) and one Austronesian language group (Formosan). In the end, in spite of having similar syntax in other ways, the languages behave quite differently. Two languages, Indonesian and Malagasy, while pointing to certain necessary modifications, provide further support for the Voice Restructuring proposal. Formosan languages superficially show signs of having Voice Restructuring, but closer inspection shows that Formosan Voice morphology requires an account that does not involve the Voice head. And finally Tagalog, like English, has no Voice Restructuring at all.
Online participants can join using this link: https://mcgill.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYvfu6orzIrHtEHSdthyymSx50ZHxlHqvwu.
*Lisa has provided this citation: Wurmbrand, S. and Shimamura, K. (2017). The features of the Voice domain: actives, passives, and restructuring. In D’Alessandro, R., Franco, I., and Gallego, A. J., editors, The Verbal Domain, pages 179–204. Oxford University Press.