Katya Morgunova (McGill) will be presenting a talk “Topics in Kanien’kéha sentential complementation.” The meeting will take place on Monday, December 9 at 3pm in Room 002 of the McGill linguistics department. Katya’s abstract is below:
Kanien’kéha has two types of complement clauses: clauses headed by a verb with the Optative modal prefix, and clauses introduced by the complementizer tsi. Previously, both types have been argued to be finite CP clauses (Baker 1996, Ikeda 1996). In this talk, I discuss how these claims align with two empirical puzzles that have not previously received much attention in the Iroquoianist literature. First, I examine the distribution of the two complement clause strategies relative to different semantic classes of matrix verbs and discuss how they fit with larger cross-linguistic patterns. I then talk about the fact that the two clauses are negated by two different negative strategies and explore possible explanations for it.
Online participants can join with this link: https://mcgill.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYvfu6orzIrHtEHSdthyymSx50ZHxlHqvwu.