Zlata Odribets (McGill) will be presenting a talk “Passives and antipassives in Tlingit.” The meeting will take place on Monday, November 4 at 3pm in Room 002 of the McGill linguistics department. Zlata’s abstract is below:
In this talk, I will be presenting preliminary fieldwork data from Tlingit, which offers new insights into how passives and antipassives operate in Na-Dene. Across the Na-Dene language family, d– is part of a triplet of prefixes called “classifiers,” originally considered to be meaningless markers of verb classes but since recognized to be able to mark the transitivity of a verb (Kibrik 1996, Thompson 1996). In Tlingit, the cognate d– prefix forms antipassives as well as passives and middles (Leer 1991, Crippen 2019). I will report on previously undocumented findings, such as that some verbs with d– are ambiguous between a passive and an antipassive reading, the existence of equivalents to by-phrases for passives but not for antipassives, and the inability to “stack” d-’s to create a form that is both passivized and antipassivized for an impersonal interpretation.
Online participants can join using this link: https://mcgill.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYvfu6orzIrHtEHSdthyymSx50ZHxlHqvwu.