We are happy to announce a talk by D. Aremu, K. Hartmann, A. Himmelreich, J. Mursell (GU Frankfurt) in the Syntax Colloquium.
The talk will take place in person. Room IG 4.301
Date: November 21
Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct
Title: When long distance dependencies are actually short: The case of Mabia languages
Abstract:
Mabia languages (formerly Gur, Northern Ghana), all SVO, exhibit morpho-syntactic reflexes with short A‘-movement. In this talk, we observe that these reflexes are absent in long distance (LD) A‘-dependencies. We argue that this follows from the general absence of LD movement in Mabia languages. We propose that the extracted XP is base-generated at the phase edge of the embedded clause and that it moves clause-internally to the main clause periphery. We further discuss how this type of analysis fits to the presence or absence of long-distance A‘-movement in other non-related languages and we point out some of the theoretical challenges that the data present.