Lecture Series – Tom Leu (UQAM)

Professor Thomas Leu (Université du Québec à Montréal) will be giving a mini-course in three sessions on June 7th(2-4) and8th (10-12, 2-4). See below for details!   Title: The morphosyntax around German d Place & time: Thursday, June 7, 2-4:  SP 0.02 Friday, June 8, 10-12: SH 1.101 Friday, June 8, 2-4:  CAS 1.812 Abstract: While d, as a voiced coronal stop, is a rather ordinary almost boring speech sound (cf. English duh), d qua morpheme in German is, when looked at the right way, perhaps the most intriguing and insight-granting single grammatical ele- ment in human language discovered to date. This mini-course is about what makes me think so. In particular, I argue that it is this one morpheme d that we find in the seemingly distinct morphosyntactic environments of der ‘the’, dieser ‘this’, jeder ‘every’, dass ‘thatC ’, and that its syntactic properties are pivotal in understanding aspects of (i) V2 and (ii) the weak/strong adjectival declension alternation. The latter point has important consequences for our understanding of dative and genitive morphology. The former point gives a meaning to the -finite in definite, leading us...
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