Upcoming events
Event Information:
-
Mon05Sep2022Fri09Sep2022Gent
14th International Colloquium on Late and Vulgar Latin (Latin vulgaire – latin tardif XIV)
Show contentPlease note: the conference has been postponed again due to the continuing uncertainties related to the covid-19 pandemic and will take place from Monday, September 5th to Friday, September 9th, 2022.
The 14th International Colloquium on Late and Vulgar Latin (Latin vulgaire – latin tardif XIV) will be held at the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy of Ghent University (Belgium) from Monday, September 5th to Friday, September 9th, 2022. It will be organized by the Latin section and the research group DiaLing at the Department of Linguistics, under the auspices of the Comité international pour l'étude du latin vulgaire et tardif (www.unibg.it/lvlt).
The colloquium will be held in English, French, German, Spanish, Italian and Latin. As per tradition, it will be devoted to all linguistic aspects of late, informal, non-standard and colloquial Latin (including the transition from Latin to Romance).
For all further information, please visit the website of the colloquium at https://www.lvlt14.ugent.be. For any additional questions you may have, please contact the organisers at lvlt14@ugent.be.
Past events
Event Information:
-
Thu15Jun20171:00 pmGrote vergaderzaal, 3de verdieping Blandijn
Multiple subjects across categories: Evidence from Modern Standard Arabic
Show contentDialing talk: Fayssal Tayalati en Lieven Danckaert (Université de Lille 3), "Multiple subjects across categories: Evidence from Modern Standard Arabic"
In this talk we focus on a particular type of tough-construction in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), illustrated in (1)-(2). In these examples we see a DP (bracketed), followed by an adjective (underscored) and a deverbal noun. Attached to this last element is a resumptive pronoun (glossed as ‘RP’) which corefers with the bracketed DP.
(1) [hāḏā l-kitābu]i mumtiʿun qirāʾatu-hui
this the-book.ᴍ.sɢ.ɴᴏᴍ pleasant.ᴍ.sɢ.ɴᴏᴍ read.f.sɢ.ɴᴏᴍ-ʀᴘ.ᴍ.sɢ
‘This book is pleasant to read.’ (= predicative reading, root clause)
(2) [[al-ʿimāratu]i [ṣ-ṣaʿbu bayʿu-hāi]] bīʿat ʾaẖīran
the-building.f.sɢ.ɴᴏᴍ the-difficult.ᴍ.sɢ.ɴᴏᴍ sell.ᴍ.sɢ.ɴᴏᴍ-ʀᴘ.f.sɢ was.sold finally
‘[The building which is difficult to sell] was finally sold.’ (= attributive reading, DP)
A key property of these structures concerns the agreement morphology on the adjective. In MSA, attributive and predicative adjectives canonically agree with their head noun or subject. However, as can be deduced from (2), the adjective in tough-constructions does not agree in number, gender or case with the lefthand DP, but rather it appears with ‘default’ nominative masculine singular morphology.
We will propose a unified analysis of (1)-(2), which crucially incorporates the idea that the relevant structures contain two distinct subject positions. First, to account for the observed lack of agreement between the DP and the adjective, we adopt Mohammad’s (1990, 2000) suggestion that the ‘default’ agreement which can be observed in a number of (impersonal) constructions in MSA is due to the presence of a (phonologically null) expletive subject. We take this expletive pronoun to be located in SpecTP, where it agrees with the adjectival predicate. Next, having discarded the hypothesis that the initial DP sits in an A-bar position, we propose that it occurs in Cardinaletti’s (2004) SubjP, i.e. a high subject position which is associated with an ‘aboutness’ reading. Interestingly, there is independent evidence that in MSA (as well as in many other languages) two clause-mate subject positions can be filled simultaneously by non-coreferring XPs: this is the case in the ‘broad subject’ pattern discussed in e.g. Alexopoulou et al. (2004).