Speaker: Ethan Poole (UMass Amherst) Title: Deconstructing quirky subjects Date/Time:Thursday, October 09, 12:30-1:45pm Location: 32-D461
Quirky (nonnominative) subjects differ across languages in whether they display the full range of properties exhibited by canonical nominative subjects. Based on data from Icelandic, German, Hindi-Urdu, Basque, and Laz, I show that the subjecthood properties exhibited by quirky subjects crosslinguistically obey an implicational hierarchy. I argue that this hierarchy is the result of DPs exhibiting a set of subjecthood properties as a function of how high they raise in the functional sequence.