Speaker: Ksenia Ershova (MIT)
Title: Licensed to license: Deficient probes in West Circassian nominalizations
Time: Thursday, March 23rd, 12:30pm – 2pm
Abstract: This talk argues for a context-dependent, counter-cyclic view of φ-probe feature
deficiency: verbal probes must be licensed by the highest head in the extended projection (C^0) in order to agree with and license nominal arguments. This is supported by verbal nominalizations in West Circassian (WC), which, despite being as large as TP and including the full range of verbal φ-probes, cannot expone verbal φ-agreement, assign case or license arguments. The proposal may be extended to other instances of probes being licensed by a higher projection, e.g. ERG-assigning v^0 in Hindi (Legate 2008) or genitive of negation in Russian (Bailyn 2004).