Speaker: Giovanni Roversi (MIT)
Title: Possessives in Äiwoo as relative clauses
Time: Tuesday, October 26th, 1pm – 2pm
Abstract: I will present preliminary work on possessive structures in Äiwoo (Oceanic; Solomon Islands). I will argue that a possessive construction like “my dogs” really underlyingly is a relative clause from which the theme is being extracted, i.e. “the dogs [such that] I have (them)”. I will present converging evidence from agreement morphology, voice morphology, and syntax and word order facts, and I will argue that a relative clause-based analysis is able to both account for and capture a few facts/generalizations that would otherwise remain unexplained.