Seminaire de Recherche: Michal Starke (U. Tromsö)

Towards a nanosyntax of case, class and agreement

Nanosyntax provides a precise and predictive approach to syncretism, which can be used to probe the fine grained syntactic structures involved. There has recently been a lot of work on case suffixes using that line of thought, resulting in two dissertations, Caha (2009) and Pantcheva (forthcoming). Taraldsen (2009) extends this line of research to account for the difference between case as seen on nouns and case as seen on adjectives, pronouns, etc based on a ground-breaking study of Bantu class markers. This exciting work is starting to lead towards a precise approach to a traditionally murky territory: the syntactic representation of case, categories, and agreement features. As the general picture emerges, many small pieces are still missing, and one entire domain stands out in need to be integrated: class features. Class features figure prominently in case paradigms and any account of the underlying grammar of the case/agreement particles/affixes must deal with them and their syncretisms. In this talk, I will give an overview of the collaborative work between Caha, Pantcheva, Taraldsen and myself in this domain, as well as a first shot at integrating "horizontal syncretisms" between declension classes.

- Mardi 27 octobre, 12h15 - salle L208

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