Whamit!

The Weekly Newsletter of MIT Linguistics

Syntax Square 3/7 - Alya Asarina and Jeremy Hartman

Speakers: Alya Asarina and Jeremy Hartman
Title: Genitive subject licensing in Uyghur subordinate clauses
Time: Monday, March 7, 11:30am-12:30pm
Location: 32-D461

In this talk we analyze embedded clauses in Uyghur, a Turkic language spoken in the Xinjiang province of China. We make three main claims. First, we claim that genitive case on the subjects of these clauses is licensed by agreement with a clause-external D head. Second, we claim that these clauses are always embedded by a head noun, though in some cases this noun is phonologically null. Third, we show that these clauses are full CPs that can be headed by an overt complementizer. Putting these claims together, we conclude that Uyghur exhibits agreement and case-assignment over a CP boundary, and thus provides a challenge for certain proposals about the locality of these relationships. We discuss several approaches to the Uyghur facts, as well as similar phenomena in other languages, within the framework of Phase Theory (Chomsky 2001 et seq.).