This week’s syntax-semantics reading group meeting will take place Friday, November 19th at 2:30pm. Tessa Scott will be presenting her work “Object licensing in San Juan Atitán Mam”.
Abstract: In Mam, and a subset of other Mayan languages, ergative subjects are restricted from undergoing A-bar extraction. A camp of analyses attribute the inability of extracting ergative subjects to movement of the transitive object above the subject (Campana 1992, Ordóñez 1995, Coon et al. 2014, Coon et al. 2021). Coon et. al. (2014) tie this movement to the case licensing of the object by Infl. Crucially, languages which license objects low via Voice do not show the syntactic ergativity effects. New data from San Juan Atitán Mam requires us to think more about this correlation, as we see evidence that objects are licensed low by Voice but nonetheless move above subjects causing an ergative extraction restriction in the language. I propose that SJA Mam does not fit neatly into the “high-/low-abs” distinction, as it generally has “high” Set B morphemes, and restricts ergative argument extraction, yet licenses objects via Voice.