Whamit!

The Weekly Newsletter of MIT Linguistics

Syntax Square 2/14 - Maziar Toosarvandani

Speaker: Maziar Toosarvandani (UCLA)
Title: The role of nominalization in Northern Paiute embedding
Time: Monday, February 14, 11.30-12.30PM
Location: 32-D461

Northern Paiute—a Uto-Aztecan language of the western United States—has two strategies for creating nonsubject relative clauses: one that previous authors have treated as an externally-headed relative clause and another, previously unnoticed, that has the profile of an internally-headed relative clause. Both types involve a suffix “-na” on the embedded verb that is formally identical to a nominalizer that creates nonsubject event participant and event nominalizations. This is not an accidental similarity, since I argue that nominalization lies at the core of both nonsubject relative clause strategies.