RESCHEDULED: SIL talk: Steven Foley (USC)

The talk by Steven Foley on 12 October is CANCELED!

Steven Foley (University of Southern California) will give a Syntax Interface Lecture on 12 October, with the title Inverted agents and demoted goals in Georgian

Abstract

Case marking in Georgian transitive clauses differs across tense categories. Most strikingly, external arguments in perfect tenses “invert”: they appear in dative case and control erstwhile indirect-object agreement; would-be dative indirect objects are “demoted” to non-agreeing PPs. Nevertheless, evidence from the anticausative alternation, voice-sensitive allomorphy, and the person–case constraint indicates that (di)transitive clauses are syntactically identical across tenses, whatever their surface case alignment. This implicates a model of morphosyntax where abstract case categories can be spelled out according to rules sensitive to the structural configuration of DPs and functional heads.

Everyone welcome! If you wish to follow the talk online and you are not in the SIL Teams group, please contact the organizers at this email address