[PLing] Talk by Jonathan Bobaljik, June 21, 16:00

[Magdalena Lohninger]

Dear colleagues,

we are happy to announce that Jonathan Bobaljik (Harvard University) 
will give a talk in the Theoretical Linguistics Colloquium on *Friday, 
21.6., 16:00, Sensengasse 3A, Seminarraum 3.* Title & Abstract are 
attached below.

Further information as well as upcoming events can be found on our 
website: https://sites.google.com/view/totlvienna/upcoming?pli=1.

We're looking forward to seeing many of you there!

Best,
Iva Kovač, Valerie Wurm & Magdalena Lohninger


TITLE: Structuring Itelmen Word Order

ABSTRACT:
Word order in Itelmen (itl, Chukotko-Kamchatkan) is quite flexible and has not been previously studied in any depth. This talk draws on a small text corpus to investigate the role of Information Structure in conditioning the distribution of object-verb and verb-object (OV,VO) word orders. Although speakers in elicitation contexts generally assent to both orders and describe them as meaning the same, a robust pattern emerges in the corpus: O denoting new discourse entities are overwhelmingly preverbal, while given objects may occur pre- or post-verbally. In this talk, I argue that these results have a variety of implications: (i) the observed pattern converges with other evidence that Itelmen is an OV language and provides an argument that the VO order in Itelmen is not simply a calque from Russian, (ii) the Information-Structural evidence provides a means to resolve a syntactic puzzle about the analysis of perception verb complements in Itelmen, (iii) the pattern contributes to larger debates about the syntactic/grammatical representation of new versus given (or topic and focus), potentially arguing against “focus-movement” (cartographic) perspectives, and (iv) Information Structure provides a better characterization of the OV/VO alternations than competing accounts of such alternations that appeal to extra-grammatical communicative efficiency, notably those rooted in ambiguity avoidance with animate objects.

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