Oussama Haddad will be giving a syntax brown bag on Friday May 1 at 1:30 in the Linguistics department conference room.
Title: The Silence of the NOUNS: Alternate Agreement in Lebanese Abstract Nominal Constructions
Abstract:
In this talk I claim that Lebanese uses alternate agreement options in order to grammatically encode the presence of an unpronounceable abstract silent NOUN as the head of a complex nominal phrase. I will do so by arguing that this apparent agreement mismatch is a case of canonical agreement which intends to signal the presence of a feminine-singular NOUN which is responsible for shifting the interpretation of the noun phrase toward an abstract reading. I explore the lexical properties of silent NOUN as it occurs elsewhere in the language, which shows NOUN to be a syntactically active nominal-- irreplaceable with any other pronounceable element.