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Linguistics Seminar Series

Seminar Series: "The syntactic and postsyntatic derivation of agreement: Basque and beyond"

Recent work on agreement has uncovered evidence that morphological properties of sentences (such as syncretism) interact in non-trivial ways with agreement relations. In this talk, I provide an analysis of this type of interaction between morphology and agreement in terms of a two-step theory of agreement. Adopting the terminology in Arregi and Nevins 2012, we can refer to these as Agree-Link, or the syntactic establishment of an Agree relation between Probe (agreement target) and one or more Goals (agreement controller(s)), and Agree-Copy, or the postsyntactic copying from Agree-Linked Goal(s) onto the Probe. Evidence for this split of Agree into two separate steps comes from the fact that they can be derivationally intercalated by postsyntactic operations such as Linearization in Hindi and Slovenian (Bhatt and Walkow 2013, and Marusic, Nevins and Badecker 2015) postsyntactic morpheme displacement (cliticization) in Bulgarian (Arregi and Nevins 2013), and Vocabulary Insertion (exponence) in West Germanic (van Koppen 2005).

I offer evidence for this two-step analysis of agreement from a different empirical domain, namely, the interaction of agreement with case syncretisms due to postsyntacic impoverishment (in the sense of Distributed Morphology) in Indo-Aryan and Basque. In both cases, variation in the possibility of agreement with oblique case-marked arguments (ergative in Indo-Aryan, dative in Basque) is due to a uniform establishment of syntactic Agree-Link relations, coupled with dialect- or language-particular differences in the application of Agree-Copy and its derivational interaction with postsyntactic impoverishment rules.

The interaction of agreement and case syncretism in these languages converges with other phenomena in arguing for a strongly derivational theory of Agree in which the latter is established in two steps, the second of which is postsyntactic and can interact in different derivationally defined ways with other postsyntactic operations. The variation found is thus largely reduced to familiar feeding and counterfeeding interactions among operations in a derivational theory.

Date:
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Location:
W.T. Young Library 2-34A (Active Learning Classroom)
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Seminar Series: "An Overview of the Structure of Romani"

This lecture will introduce the basic structures that define Romani as a unified language, as well as its basic dialectal divisions. Special attention will be paid to Balkan Romani and to Romani as a Balkan language.

Date:
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Location:
Niles Gallery (Fine Arts Library)
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Seminar Series: "Convergent evolution in French-Breton and Welsh-English language contact"

The two closely related Celtic languages Breton and Welsh represent an interesting comparative laboratory for exploring language contact phenomena, since much of the period of their divergence from a common ancestor has been accompanied by intense language contact: Breton with French, and Welsh with English. A number of the ways that the modern forms of the two Celtic languages differ from each other, including reflexive and reciprocal constructions and the encoding of motion events, can be seen as cases in which the two languages have, over time, moved in the direction of aligning their patterns with those of French and English respectively, in a process of convergent evolution which is distinct from, though related to, grammatical borrowing. In neither modern language do the patterns match those of the contact language perfectly, but the isomorphy with French and English is nonetheless striking, especially when seen against the background of other effects of intense contact in these languages.

Date:
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Location:
Niles Gallery (Fine Arts Library)
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Seminar Series: "Multiple Language, Cultural, and Ethnic Self-Identities of the German Lutheran Population in 'Russian Poland' in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries"

Most studies of language and confessional minorities focus on the self-identity, singular, of members of a minority community. Some minority populations, however, have two or more concurrent language, cultural, and ethnic self-identities (although usually only one confessional self-identity). This talk examines the self-perceptions of an understudied minority population, the Lutheran Russian Germans living in the western part of the Russian Empire known as Congress Poland or “Russian Poland” (now eastern Poland and southern Lithuania) during the 19th and early 20th centuries, before they were forcibly resettled by the Russian government into interior Russia during World War One.

The Russian Germans, also known as “German Russians,” were Russian citizens, the descendants of German artisans who had migrated to Russia in the late 18th and early 19th centuries by invitation of Catherine the Great and Paul I. Those in Russian Poland lived mostly in integrated communities together with Poles, Lithuanians, Jews, Belarusians, and Russians. Most were trilingual in Polish, Russian, and Low German, with some knowing Lithuanian as well. Based on documents in Lithuanian and Polish archives and a private collection in the U.S., the talk focuses on the Lutheran Russian German populations in the adjoining provinces of Suwałczyzna and Łomża (now Suvalkija in Lithuania and Mazowsze in Poland, respectively) and their adoption of Polish, Lithuanian, and Russian cultural features, as reflected in their naming and signature practices, language choices, cuisine, and self-identity as a group during a period when the concept of ethnicity had not yet been developed in Russia.

Date:
-
Location:
Niles Gallery (Fine Arts Library)
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