Course Description
A long-standing tenet in generative syntactic theory has been that nominal arguments must be formally “licensed” by abstract case assignment, by participating in a syntactic dependency with a functional head in the clause. However, there are also alternative approaches that advocate for the separation of case assignment and nominal licensing. In this course, we will investigate the morphosyntactic properties of case and licensing, with an eye towards expanding our understanding of their integration vs. separability. Much of our course will also focus on gray areas in which the roles of (morphological) case and nominal licensing are less clear-cut. We investigate two dimensions of this tension in particular: (i) nominal licensing effects in the absence of case assignment, and (ii) the occurrence of (morphological) case assignment without any obvious licensors (or licensing effects).
Area Tags: Syntax, Morphology, Typology, Linguistic Frameworks
(Session 2) Tuesday/Friday 1:30pm – 2:50pm
Location: ILC S331
Instructors: Michelle Yuan
Michelle Yuan is an Assistant Professor in Linguistics at UC San Diego (PhD from MIT, 2018). Her research primarily focuses on theoretical issues at the syntax-morphology interface, and she has worked on topics such as case and agreement, ergativity, movement, and polysynthetic word-formation. She specializes in the morphosyntax of Inuktitut and other Eastern Canadian varieties of the Inuit language, and has more recently begun working on the San Juan Piñas variety of Mixtec.
