We are happy to announce a talk by Imke Driemel (Humboldt University Berlin) in the Syntax Colloquium.
The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301.
Title:Implicit arguments and their morpho-syntactic effects
Date: May 9
Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct
Abstract:
Implicit arguments are covert elements whose syntactic representations questioned in some way or another (Bhatt and Pancheva 2017). While much of the literature of implicit arguments is focused on thematic arguments such as PRO, pro, or the agent of passives, this talk will present two case studies on implicit non-thematic arguments: i) the perspectival center of the come/go alternation in the Northwest Caucasian language Adyghe, and ii) the speaker/hearer representation in allocutive marking languages of East Asia and South America. For i), it will be shown that the licensing of the perspectival center matches the language’s strategy to signal PCC effects. For ii), we will investigate an interaction of gender and honorific marking which runs parallel to DOM effects. Not only will the case studies provide evidence for the syntactic presence of implicit arguments, but they will also reveal in which position and to what extend they are syntactically represented.