Speaker: Matthew Tyler (Yale) and Michelle Yuan (MIT)
Title: Nominal-clitic case mismatches (WCCFL Practice Talk)
Date and time: Thursday, April 12, 12:30-1:50pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:
When arguments are clitic-doubled, the clitic and the nominal it doubles typically bear the same case feature. However, recent theoretical work on clitic-doubling, including but not limited to so-called ‘Big DP’ analyses (e.g. Uriagereka 1995, Nevins 2011, Kramer 2014) treats clitics and nominals as separable entities in the syntactic derivation. Given this background, we propose that under the right syntactic conditions, nominals and their clitics should be able to mismatch in case features. In particular, we identify and investigate two classes of mismatch, which form the mirror image of each other. In Choctaw (Muskogean), nominals acquire case features that their associated clitics lack, while in Yimas (Lower-Sepik; data from Foley 1991), clitics acquire case features that their associated nominals lack. We argue that these mismatches are the consequence of case-assignment operations that target nominals or clitics individually.