May 11, 2015

Research Groups: Week of May 11-15

Wednesday, May 13 - 10:00 AM to 11:30 AM in SS 2128
Syntax/Semantics Group
Amer Ahmed: "On Agreement affixes, incorporated pronouns, and clitics in Standard Arabic."

Verbal affixes, which index the subject in Standard Arabic (SA) are almost unanimously treated as pure agreement affixes in the generative literature (cf. Ouhala 1994, Benmamoun 2000, Mohammad 2000, Aoun, Benmamoun and Choueiri 2010, Soltan 2007, Al-Balushi 2011 among many others). Using a number of diagnostics, it is shown that verbal affixes which index the subject are functionally ambiguous in that they exhibit some of the properties of pure agreement affixes and some other properties of incorporated pronouns. The study therefore lends support to the functional ambiguity hypothesis of subject verbal affixes in SA, which is proposed in Fassi Fehri (1990, 1993). The study uses the framework known as Distributed Morphology (DM) (Halle and Marantz 1993) to show that Fassi Fehri’s (1990, 1993) characterization of the morphological realization of some of these affixes is not accurate. The study also uses other diagnostics to claim that object verbal affixes are better treated as clitics rather than incorporated pronouns, as is proposed in Fassi Fehri (1990, 1993). 

Elizabeth Cowper, Bronwyn Bjorkman, Daniel Currie Hall, Rebecca Tollan, and Neil Banerjee: "There's no future in Old English."

Friday, May 15 - 9:30 AM to 11:00 AM in SS 560A
Psycholinguistics Group
Sara Pearsell, presenting joint work with Aravind Namasivayam and Pascal Van Lieshout of Speech-Language Pathology: "Linguistic-cognitive dual-task influence on speech motor stability and automaticity."

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