Heidi Harley, University of Arizona

“Suppressing Subject Arguments in Hiaki”

The Hiaki passive suffix -wa appears in a very normal-looking personal passive, and also in an odd impersonal passive—odd in that it is productive with unaccusative as well as unergative intransitive predicates, provided they have a [+human] argument. It appears that -wa can even make a personal passive out of a raising predicate, suppressing the embedded subject and promoting the embedded object.

I will lay out the empirical picture for you, mainly focussing on investigating whether the apparent impersonal construction might have a null impersonal subject argument, and arguing that it does not. Then I will illustrate where my thinking is going about how -wa operates, aiming for a unified treatment of -wa across the personal and impersonal constructions using half of Lechner 2012’s reflexivization operation. Then I will ask for lots and lots of input.

Linguistic Colloquium:
The Linguistic department hosts colloquium talks by distinguished faculty from around the world.

Fall 2015
October 9th: Keith Johnson, UC Berkeley
October 16th: Heidi Harley, University of Arizona
October 30th: Ivano Caponigro, UC San Diego
November 20th: Elliott Moreton, University of North Carolina

Winter 2016
January 15th: Sharon Inkelas, UC Berkeley
February 5th: Colin Phillips, University of Maryland
February 6th: N. Goodman, Stanford University and A. Kehler, UC San Diego
March 5th: Linguistics Conference at Santa Cruz Conference

Spring 2016
April 15th: Sabine Iatridou, MIT
April 29th: Paul Kiparsky, Stanford University
May 6, 7, 8: Semantics of Under-Represented Languages in the Americas 9
May 20th: Kyle Johnson, University of Massachusetts
May 27th/June 3rd (TBA): Linguistics Undergraduate Research Conference