[PLing] Reminder: talk by Jonathan Bobaljik, June 21

[Magdalena Lohninger]

Dear colleagues,

this is a reminder 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.

We're looking forward to seeing 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.

-- 
Magdalena Lohninger
Linguist, University of Vienna

magdalena.lohninger at univie.ac.at
https://lenalohninger.wordpress.com/
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