We are happy to announce a talk by Vadim Dyachkov (LLACAN / CNRS, Paris) in the Syntax Colloquium.
The talks will take place in person. Room IG 4.301
Date: October 21, 2024
Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct
Title: “Decomposing middle voice in Natioro”
Abstract:
My talk deals with the properties of middle voice in Natioro, an underdescribed Gur language spoken in Burkina Faso. In Natioro, middle voice forms (whose exponent is the lengthened vowel of the perfective stem) exhibit properties similar to those of passive constructions. Depending on the lexical class of a verb, Natioro middle forms also can have anticausative, detransitive, but not reflexive and reciprocal, meanings. However, the agent can never be expressed overtly, and there is no construction corresponding to English by-phrases. Nevertheless, standard tests applied to detect the presence of the agent (agent control, licensing of instrumental adjuncts, possibility to passivize causatives) show that it is indeed present in the semantic structure. In my talk, I discuss the results of these tests showing that some of them cannot be interpreted directly – for instance, control clauses should be analyzed as binding structures and the ability to license instrumentals depends entirely on the presence vs. underspecification of the agent in the lexical entry of a given predicate. I also give a detailed analysis of the phenomenon using the existing theories of event structure.