[PLing] Guest lecture on Verbal Number in Kalenjin by Nadja Fiebig, June 27th 16:00

[Sinoël Gordon Isidor Dohlen]

Dear PLing crowd,

I'd like to invite you to a guest lecture within the proseminar "The 
Grammar of Number".
Nadja Fiebig (Universität Leipzig) will talk about her work on Verbal 
Number in Kalenjin based on original data collected by her during 
fieldwork.
It'll take place in Seminarraum 3 at Sensengasse 3a on Thursday 27th of 
June from 16:00 to 17:30.

Abstract:
While nominal number marks the number of individuals, verbal number 
marks
the number of events. Verbal number is assumed to exist in two flavours: 
event
and participant number (Corbett 2000). Several languages express both of 
these
flavours by the same marking strategy. The following example illustrates 
how
Mupun marks both, event and participant number by the very same 
suppletive
form.

(1) Mupun (Frajzyngier 1993: 59-62)
a.
wu    cit        wur
3m.SG hit.PST.SG 3m.SG
‘He hit him.’

b.
wu    nas/*cit   mo
3m.SG hit.PST.PL 3PL
‘He hit them.’ (participant number)

c.
wu    nas        wur
3m.SG hit.PST.PL 3m.SG
‘He hit him many times.’ (event number)


Kalenjin, a Southern Nilotic dialect cluster spoken in Kenya, also 
exhibits both
flavours of verbal number. But in contrast to Mupun, different markers 
for
these flavours can be observed, which can even co-occur:

(2) Kipsigis (Kouneli 2021: 7)
a.
lAbAt -i    l`a:kw`E:t
run.SG-IPFV child.NOM
‘The child is running.’

b.
ruaj        l`A:gˆo:k
run.PL.IPFV children.NOM
‘The children are running.’ (participant number)

c.
ruAj∼ruAj  l`A:gˆo:k
run.PL∼RED children.NOM
‘The childen are running over and over again.’ (event number)

My talk will introduce event number in two Kalenjin varieties (Kipsigis 
and
Pokot) based on original field work conducted in Kenya. I will give a 
brief
overview over the typological distribution of marking strategies of 
event and
participant number and show how the seemingly contradictory Kalenjin and
Mupun facts can be reconciled under the assumption that two different 
elements
in the syntactic structure express event number cross-linguistically.