Speaker: Jessica Coon (Harvard) & Omer Preminger (MIT)
Title: Transitivity in Chol: A New Argument for the Split VP Hypothesis
Time: Thursday 10/14, 12:30—1:45pm
Location: 32-D461
In this paper we provide a new argument for the Split VP Hypothesis (Bowers 1993, Kratzer 1996, i.a.), the idea that external arguments are base-generated outside the syntactic projection of the stem, in vP. The new evidence comes from the different behavior of stems with and without complements in the Mayan language Chol. While our argument shares certain similarities with Kratzer 1996, the data we examine show a clearer correlation between the following properties: (i) projecting an external argument; (ii) assigning Case to the object; (iii) determining the categorical status of the stem as verb.