George Bennett (McGill) will present a talk “Case and agreement in Scandinavian pancake sentences”. The meeting will take place on Monday, September 23 at 3pm in Room 002 of the McGill linguistics department. George’s abstract is below:
Pancake sentences are copula constructions in which the predicative adjective (e.g., yummy) bears default phi-features and the subject (e.g., pancakes) is interpreted as denoting a contextually salient event or experience (e.g., eating or making them). Extraposition evidence from Scandinavian languages, Brazilian Portuguese, and Hebrew suggests that the pancake subject is not a clausal category, and the frequent occurrence of definite and referential pancake subjects suggests that they cannot be treated as non-referential NumPs/NPs. Given their DP status, pancake subjects must therefore have other formal or semantic properties that make their phi-features inaccessible to agreeing adjectives. In this talk, I present novel observations regarding the subject’s case (which differs in Norwegian/Swedish and Icelandic), the (im)possibility of experiencer vs. benefactor phrases, and the morphological form of Norwegian pronominal ‘subject doubles’, all three of which differ in ordinary copula constructions. I explore to what extent these formal properties are analogous to psych verb constructions, and discuss the semantic category of the subject, including to what extent it is similar to kinds and individuals.
Online participants can join using this link: https://mcgill.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYvfu6orzIrHtEHSdthyymSx50ZHxlHqvwu.