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This seminar will focus on reference tracking devices,
broadly conceived, in several language families in North America,
including Algonquian, Athabaskan, Iroquoian and Muskogean. These
devices invlove syntactic and morphosyntactic systems that do not fit
neatly into existing theories of phi features, agreement and Case.
The topics to be covered include inverse/directional systems,
obviation, switch reference and animacy hierarchy effects. We
will exlore the question of whether these systems should be accounted
for within theories of Case and Agreement. If so, what are the
parameters that distinguish such systems from more familiar systems?
If not, do the properties of these systems follow from syntactic
configurations, or must they be encoded as part of the morphosyntactic
system? Progress on these questions will give us insight into the
crosslinguistic properties of the mappings between argument structure,
syntax, PF and discourse representation. |
