We are happy to announce a talk by Daniel Aremu (GU) in the Syntax Colloquium.
The talk will take place in person. Room IG 4.301
Date: January 09
Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct
Title: Association with Focus Sensitive Particle only in Kasem and Kusaal
Abstract:
The syntactic properties and distribution of Focus Sensitive Particles (FSPs) (alternative-sensitive particles, à la Hartmann & Zimmermann 2008) like only, also, even, too, almost, etc., have been a cross-linguistic conundrum for some decades. Although two approaches/analysis have been muted: adnominal analysis (the adjunction of the FSP to the focused DP) (Ross & Cooper 1979), and adverbial
analysis (adjunction to the Extebded Verbal Projections (EVPs)) (Jackendoff 1972;
Jacobs 1983; Büring & Hartmann 2001; Mursell 2020), the choice of analysis is not
an easy one to make. In fact, languages which seems to show an adnominal positionon the surface, have been argued to involve an EVPs adjunction (eg. German, Büring& Hartmann 2001; Mursell 2020) (cf. König 1991). Even what seems to be a clear
dichotomy in some languages, have been argued otherwise. It is on this note that my talk seeks to propose a syntactic distribution for FSPonly in two Mabia languages, Kusaal and Kasem. While I argue that boththeadnominal and the EVP analyses are present in both languages respectively, I show that there are yet open questions to be answered.