Speaker: Rajesh Bhatt (UMass Amherst)
Title: A blocking effect in Hindi-Urdu
Time: Friday, March 15th, 3:30pm – 5pm
Location: 32-141
Abstract: In this talk, I will present a blocking effect in Hindi-Urdu that could be characterized as Poser blocking, namely a word winning over a phrase. This blocking arises in the context of deverbal adjectives and its analysis has implications for the representation of adjectives as a syntactic category and the structure of verbal derivations in Hindi-Urdu.
Many languages have specialized morphology that can verbalize adjectives. In English, for example, -en can combine with a number of adjectives (e.g. flatten, redden). Hindi-Urdu lacks verbalizing morphology of this sort but it has another device that allows for productive verbalization of adjectives. This very productive device involves the light verbs ho ‘be’ and kar ‘do’. There is, however, a restriction on the application of this very productive device: the class of deverbal adjectives cannot be verbalized via the light verb strategy. I propose that we can see verbalization as being blocked by the existence of equivalent lexical verbs; hence the characterization in terms of Poser blocking.
However I do not derive this effect by appealing to the notion of Poser blocking as a primitive. Instead I explore a derivational system where the `blocked’ cases are simply not derived; instead the derivational process delivers the corresponding lexical verbs. The derivational system I set up has a surprising feature: a semantically contentless categorizing head needs to be treated as a last resort element that is inserted countercyclically.