We are happy to announce two talks by Marie-Joe Kallab (GU Frankfurt) and Melissa Jeckel (GU Frankfurt) in the Syntax Colloquium.
The talk will take place in person. Room IG 4.301
Date: November 07
Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct
Title (Marie-Joe-Kallab): Negation in Lebanese Arabic
Abstract:
In this talk, I present my Thesis about Negation in Lebanese Arabic. I focus on sentential negation, their syntactic expression, and the interpretation of multiple negation in the Lebanese dialect, based on Zeijlstra’s (2004) research.
I demonstrate the three different negative constructions in the language, which are single negation, bipartite negation, and enclitic negation.
Furthermore, I argue that Lebanese Arabic is a Strict Negative Concord language as well as a Non-Strict Negative Concord language. There is a difference between positive and negative imperatives regarding person agreement, which suggests the usage of surrogate imperatives. Lebanese Arabic exhibits a diachronic change that argues in favor of Jespersen’s (1917) claim that languages develop regarding negation and how sentential negation is expressed. I suggest that the preverbal negative marker ‚ma’ is a negative head.
Title (Melissa Jeckel): Towards a unifying analysis for (varieties) of the Person-Case-Constraint
Abstract:
In my masterthesis I investigate the phenomenon of the Person-Case-Constraint (PCC), which is a restriction on person assignment in a combination of a direct and indirect object, i.e. clitic double object constructions. The PCC is reported for many languages, that are genetically unrelated, i.e. French, Kambera, Greek, Basque. During the last two decades, several further variaties of the PCC have been observed in other languages. These varieties are the Weak PCC, Ultrastrong PCC, Superstrong/strictly Descending PCC, Me-First PCC. The aim of my thesis is to investigate, whether there is a syntactic analysis among those previously proposed in the literature (cf. Anagnostopoulou, 2005; Béjar & Rézac, 2003, 2009; Baker, 2008, 2011; Nevins, 2007, 2011), that can account for all five types of the PCC. There are crucial factors influencing the pontential of previous analyses as to account for all PCC types, such as the definition of the person feature, word order, animacy and Case. These factors will then be discussed at the final part of the thesis.