ACLC Seminar | Eva van Lier: Alternation in argument coding across languages: lexical and other factors

Organized by the Amsterdam Center for Language and Communication! (ACLC)

• Speaker: Eva van Lier
• Location: P.C. Hoofthuis
• Room: 3.01
• Title: Alternation in argument coding across languages: lexical and other factors
• Abstract: In this talk, we give an overview of the research carried out so far in our Vidi project ‘Exceptions rule! Lexical restrictions on grammatical structure’. This project is about alternations, that is, situations in language where more than one morpho-syntactic construction can be used to express an event. Focusing on alternations in argument marking (case and agreement), we study how the choice between constructions is influenced by lexical and other factors, the latter including semantic factors (like animacy) and pragmatic factors (like topicality). We will discuss cross-linguistic data, as well as case studies of alternations in three specific languages: Kamang (Timor-Alor-Pantar), Chechen (Nakh-Daghestanian), and Persian (Indo-Iranian). These studies involve a mix of typological, corpus-based and experimental methods.