More great news about fourth-year graduate student Giovanni Roversi: Giovanni’s paper “Possession and syntactic categories: An argument from Äiwoo” has been accepted for publication at Natural Language and Linguistic Theory! In the paper, Giovanni observes that the Äiwoo language doesn’t contain possessives like “my” or “her(s)”. Instead, all it has is a possessive verb, so that “my dog” is more literally something like “the dog that I have”, and “his sister” is “the one he has as a sister”. This empirical fact ends up having repercussions for our theories of syntactic categories: something that we thought was usually nominal can actually be verbal as well. Congratulations, Giovanni!
You can read the pre-print on lingbuzz here: https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/006565.
Here’s how we recently congratulated Giovanni in the department:
