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DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20201211T132000
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SUMMARY:Rebecca Tollan: Competing Argument Privileges in Niuean
DESCRIPTION:The Department of Linguistics is pleased to present Rebecca Tollan from the University of Delaware speaking on competing argument privileges in Niuean. \nAbstract:  \nGrammatical “subjects” have long been shown to have a privileged linguistic status\, as compared\nwith other arguments\, in the processing of long-distance dependencies (e.g.\, Holmes & O’Regan\,\n1981)\, in the resolution of ambiguous anaphoric pronouns (Gordon et al.\, 1993; Grosz et al.\,\n1995\, a.o.) and in formal syntactic operations (cf. Keenan & Comrie\, 1977). In this talk\, I unpack\n“subjecthood” into two components: semantic agentivity (connected with structural superiority in\nthe thematic domain of the syntax) and case unmarkedness (defined as the case with the widest\nsyntactic distribution)\, and show how these two factors can independently influence the outcome of syntactic and pragmatic operations. This focus is on two experimental studies of the ergative-\nabsolutive Polynesian language Niuean. The goal of these studies is to investigate operations in which the “subject” of a sentence has previously been shown to be privileged\, based upon\nfindings from nominative-accusative languages in which agentivity and unmarkedness align:\nfirst\, the “subject advantage” in the processing of long-distance dependencies and second\, the\npreference for subject antecedents in the interpretation of anaphoric pronouns. Niuean reveals\nthat\, in the formation of long-distance dependencies – where the task is to link a filler with a gap\nsite and form the relevant dependency – syntactic information about argument distribution (i.e.\,\nunmarkedness) is most crucial because it maximizes chances of correctly locating the gap site.\nMeanwhile\, in the resolution of ambiguous anaphoric pronouns\, agentivity plays a more\nprominent role: the more agentive argument of a preceding clause is preferred as the referent of a\npronoun as compared with a less agentive one. These studies demonstrate the underlying factors\nwhich often cluster together to derive the grammatical function of “subject”. \nZoom Information: Will be emailed on Thursday\, December 10\, 2020
URL:https://thi.ucsc.edu/event/rebecca-tollan/
LOCATION:Virtual Event
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