We are happy to announce two talks by Yassmina El Faida (GU) and Viktor Köhlich (GU) in the Syntax Colloquium.
The talk will take place in person. Room IG 4.301
Date: February 6
Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct
Titles: Inflectional Morphology in Tarifiyt – A Typological Approach (Y. El Faida)
NO(t) Again! The Difficult Case of no in Japanese (V. Köhlich)
Abstracts:
Inflectional Morphology in Tarifiyt – A Typological Approach (Y. El Faida)
In this presentation of my master thesis, I will be talking about the (inflectional) morphology of nouns and verbs in Tarifyt, an Afroasiatic Berber language spoken in north-eastern Morocco. According to Kossmann (2000), Tarifiyt exhibits synthetic morphology. In order to analyse the findings in the language, I will present a typological framework by Bickel & Nichols (2007), who claim that the traditional morphological analysis after von Schlegel (1808) is not sufficient enough to analyse the languages of the world, as it is too general and therefore unable to encapsule the morphological complexity that many languages exhibit. They claim, that languages as a whole cannot exclusively be typologically classified with von Schlegel‘s types, as saying that a language is exclusively isolating, agglutinative and so on is not exclusive enough, because languages can exhibit different morphological strategies for different morphological processes. To combat that issue, they present different parameters: fusion, exponence, flexitivity and synthesis, while claiming that morphological processes within any given language can behave differently with regards to these given parameters. I will present their parameters in order to be able to analyse my Tarifiyt data. The goal of this thesis is to analyse the morphology of Tarifiyt nouns and verbs, with special focus on their inflection and then to compare, whether the findings on nominal morphology and verbal morphology align. To do that, I will first present Tarifiyt nouns and their inflectional morphology. Then, I will present Bickel & Nichols’ (2007) typology. Because they conducted their theory by mostly analysing verbal TMA morphology, I will first see, if the presented parameters can be applied onto the verbal inflectional morphology in Tarifiyt and then compare that to the findings for Tarifiyt nouns.
NO(t) Again! The Difficult Case of no in Japanese (V. Köhlich)
In this talk, I discuss the multifunctional and recalcitrant element no in Japanese, whose primary job is to connect a modifier to its head inside the DP. So far, no analysis for this element has been presented with enough explanatory power to account for all the scenarios it can appear in and all the modifiers it can co-occur with.
After presenting all important accounts in the literature, and why they fail to account for the full array of data, I put forth two possible novel analyses, the Mod hypothesis that takes -no as a licensor of modification, and the class marker hypothesis, that treats it as a morphological element. Although both analyses avoid some shortcomings of previous analyses, they have problems of their own which I will elaborate and evaluate.