Speaker: Michael Erlewine
Title: Qu in Squliq Atayal
Date/Time: Tuesday, Oct 2, 1-2p
Location: 32-D461
In this talk I’ll share some findings from my recent fieldwork on Atayal (Austronesian, Taiwan). Atayal exhibits the familiar “Austronesian voice system,” where verbs are marked for which argument is in a prominent, sentence-final “trigger” position (which is the subject or some topic position, depending on your view). In Atayal, the trigger is marked with ‘qu’. In the variety of Squliq Atayal I looked at this summer, in some circumstances when the trigger is not in sentence-final position (either through cliticization or leftward A’-extraction) another argument of the verb can be marked with ‘qu’. I’ll speculate on what this extra ‘qu’ marking may be, and how it relates to different conceptions of the Austronesian voice system.