Course Description
Applicatives are traditionally described as a type of affix which, when attached to a verbal stem, adds a new internal argument to the argument structure of the base verb. The interpretation of this new internal argument varies both within and across languages, but benefactive, malefactive, and possessive meanings are amongst the most commonly attested. These traditional descriptions are complicated by the existence of cases in which applicative morphology apparently fails to increase valency at all on the one hand, and by cases in which the interpretation of the applied object seems to be dictated by the lexical semantics of the verb stem rather than being drawn from a generic set on the other. The analysis of such affixes inevitably involves the interplay of syntax, morphology, and lexical semantics, and so applicatives have formed an important testing bed for theories of all of these components of the grammar and of the interfaces between them. In this class, we will give a historical overview of how applicatives have been analyzed in various generative theories from the 1970s to the present day, moving through the earliest transformationalist accounts, Relational Grammar, Lexical Functional Grammar, and various instantiations of Principles and Parameters theory. All the while, we will highlight which issues have been perennial ones, which have been solved, and which have dropped out of focus without resolution over time. The class thus serves not only to orient students to the key issues in the analysis of applicatives specifically, but also to introduce them to the last half-century of evolution n approaches to argument structure generally.
Area Tags: Syntax, Semantics, Morphology, Typology, Linguistic Frameworks
(Sessions 1 & 2) Tuesday/Friday 10:30am – 11:50pm
Location: ILC S415
Instructors: Michael Everdell & Neil Myler
Michael Everdell is a doctoral student at The University of Texas at Austin. His interests include argument structure, the division of grammatical functions, the syntax-semantics interface, lexical semantics, O’dam, Southern Tepehuan, Uto-Aztecan, and field linguistics. He has explored a range of issues around argumenthood, argument realization, grammatical function, nominal possession, event and state pluralization, and constituent structure. He has ongoing work related to how the lexical semantics of a root drive its syntactic elaboration as well as documentation of Southern Tepehuan languages. His dissertation is titled Argumenthood and Argument Realization in O’dam.
Neil Myler is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at Boston University. His interests include morphology, (micro-)comparative syntax, argument structure, the morphosyntax and semantics of possession, the interaction between syntax and morphophonology, Quechua morphology and syntax, isiXhosa morphology and syntax, and English dialect syntax. His work is mostly couched in the Distributed Morphology approach. This is a theory of the architecture of the grammar in which syntax generates all complex expressions—both “words” and “phrases”—and morphophonology and semantics each independently interpret the output of the syntactic component. He is the author of Building and Interpreting Possession Sentences (2016, MIT Press).
