McGill will host Understanding Obviation: A Cross-Linguistic Perspective, October 4–6 at McGill’s Thomson House. The full program is now available here. All are welcome to attend, but requested to register by September 22nd.
Obviation is perhaps most commonly discussed in connection with languages of the Algonquian family in which (i) multiple 3rd person nominals in a certain domain must be assigned either proximate or obviative status; (ii) proximate nominals are described as more discourse prominent; (iii) coferential patterns are governed by the proximate-obviative contrast; and (iv) the mapping between proximate and obviative nominals and grammatical function may be signalled on the verb direct and inverse morphemes. Each of these features has factored into definitions of obviation (Aissen 1997, Bliss 2017, Hammerly 2020, Oxford 2017).
A growing body of work has investigated phenomena across unrelated languages which share some or all of the above properties, raising questions about the underlying source and representation of obviation-related phenomena. For instance, Underhill (2021) shows that obviation is not restricted to 3rd person nominals in Ktunaxa, a language isolate spoken in Canada and in the United States. Aissen (1997) and Deal & Royer (2023) also show that Mayan languages, although lacking overt obviation morphology, exhibit obviation-like restrictions on certain combinations of 3rd person arguments in active verb forms. Adopting a crosslinguistic perspective, we aim to understand the relationships among phenomena related to obviation as well as the formal mechanisms underlying them.
This workshop is supported by a SSHRC Insight Grant, The Grammar of Hierarchy Effects. It is organized by project PI Jessica Coon (McGill University) and PhD student Anne Bertrand (UBC & McGill University), and includes the following invited participants:
Invited Participants
- Judith Aissen (University of California Santa Cruz)
- James Crippen (Co-PI, McGill University)
- Amy Rose Deal (University of California Berkeley)
- Christopher Hammerly (Co-PI, University of British Columbia)
- Stefan Keine (University of California Los Angeles)
- Will Oxford (Co-PI, University of Manitoba)
- Pedro Mateo Pedro (Co-PI, University of Toronto)
- Justin Royer (Co-PI, University of California Berkeley; Université de Montréal)
- Sigwan Thivierge (Co-PI, Concordia University)
- Rose Underhill (University of British Columbia)