Daniel Kaufman will be giving a Syntax Brown Bag on Friday April 3 at 1:30 in the Linguistics Conference room.
Title: v-free predication in Austronesian and its consequences, from root to clause
Abstract:
It has been argued on a purely historical basis that the well-known complex Austronesian voice system resulted from a reinterpretation of thematic nominalizations as canonical event predications (Starosta, Pawley & Reid 1981; Ross 2002; forthcoming; Kaufman forthcoming). As it turns out, the Nominalist Hypothesis, once properly transposed to a synchronic syntactic analysis, goes much further than previously realized in explaining a constellation of seemingly unrelated facts in Tagalog and other Philippine-type languages. In particular, it explains the peculiar interpretation of event denoting roots, the case marking pattern, and the so-called "subjects only" restriction on extraction, among a host of other facts. In this talk I present new work on Tagalog nominal syntax below the word level and its consequences for clausal syntax.