Julie Legate of the University of Pennsylvania will present “Restrictive Phi in a Partial Typology of Noncanonical Passives” in the Department of Linguistics colloquium series in ILC N400 Friday at 3:30. An abstract is below.

Abstract: In this talk, I investigate the syntactic structure of noncanonical
passives, focusing on the role played by phi-features that restrict rather
than saturate the external argument position.  Building on previous work by
myself and others, I show that voice is encoded in a functional projection,
VoiceP, which is distinct from, and higher than, vP.  I demonstrate that
microvariations in the properties of VoiceP and in the location of
restrictive phi-features explain a wide range of noncanonical passives,
including agent-agreeing passives, restricted agent passives, accusative
object passives, impersonals, and object voice. The analysis draws on data
from a typologically diverse set of languages.