Brandon Chaperon (McGill) will be presenting a talk “v–al-ency precognition in Wolof: How much argument structure does a root encode?” The meeting will take place on Monday, November 18 at 3pm in Room 002 of the McGill linguistics department. Brandon’s abstract is below:
Wolof (West-Atlantic; Senegambian) has a morphological syncretism between causatives and benefactives (common in many languages; Jerro, 2017). 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 propose that these are distinct homophonous morphemes instantiating different heads: –alcaus and –alben. I argue that both heads are merged low, although which one can merge rests on the later presence of an external argument. I show that this generalization is correct as manipulating argument structure involving an external argument, which also takes place low, affects the merging of either head. In either case, the low domain (≤ vP) seems to be “precognitive” about argument structure, which raises questions about whether argument structure must be (partially) encoded in roots or built entirely in the Syntax.
Online participants can join with this link: https://mcgill.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYvfu6orzIrHtEHSdthyymSx50ZHxlHqvwu.