Vicki Carstens seminar

 

GIST is pleased to announce that Prof. Vicki Carstens of the University of Missouri will give a guest lecture on
 
Activity, Agreement and A-movement: How Grammatical Gender and Case Impact Grammar
 

Date & time: 21 June 2010; 11am-12:30pm
 

Location: Ghent University, Blandijnberg 2,  room 032-A (Dutch linguistics library)

Abstract

In this talk I will describe a cluster of properties found in many Bantu languages and argue for explanatory connections among them. They are:

(i)  Hyperagreement: widespread iterating agreement patterns that are not possible in Indo-European (IE) languages.
(ii) Hyperactivity: movements of nominal expressions that are generally disallowed in IE languages, including 'Subject-Object Reversal', transitive locative inversions, and raising out of tensed clauses. 
(iii) Grammatical gender reflected in all agreement including subject agreement.
(iv)  Nouns always at the left edge of DPs (preceding their modifiers and arguments).

I will argue that systematic adjunction of Bantu nouns to D(eterminer) makes grammatical gender accessible to all clause-level heads, and that this has two broad consequences.  First, it leads to the inclusion of gender in all forms of agreement.  Second, because grammatical gender is meaningless, it functions like an English Case feature in making its bearer 'active' in movement and agreement relations (in the sense of Chomsky 2001).  We will see that these simple ideas do most of the work of deriving the unusual properties of Bantu.  The residue argues that abstract Case plays no role in Bantu grammar, and hence calls for abandonment of the view that Case is universal.

 

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For more information: amelie.rocquet(at)ugent.be