Abstract for Edward L. Keenan's talk

Special Guest Lecture: Voice and Relativization without Movement in Malagasy
Edward L. Keenan (UCLA)
May 21, 2008 (Wednesday)
4:15 PM - 6:15 PM; The CUNY Graduate Center

The seminar on the structure of the Austronesian languages will host a special session on Wednesday, 21 May, from 4:15 to 6:15 p.m. The speaker for this session will be Professor Edward Keenan, from UCLA. Information about his presentation is provided below.
If you are not a registered student in the seminar but would like to attend this special session, RSVP to MDen-Dikken@gc.cuny.edu, by Friday, 16 May (so that we can determine whether a larger room needs to be requested).

Voice and Relativization without Movement in Malagasy
Edward L. Keenan, UCLA

Major syntactic processes in Malagasy (Madagascar) are conditioned by its rich, typically W. Austronesian, voice system. This is true of the formation and interpretation of relative clauses, focus constructions, nominalizations, control structures, imperatives, the distribution of reflexives, and more. Similar claims hold to varying extents in related languages. Limiting ourselves to Malagasy, we derive and compositionally interpret nuclear Ss headed by verbs in different voices. Such Ss are directly projected from verbal affixes, not derived by A or AN movement, contra other approaches. We derive relative clauses (RCs) directly from predicates in different voices. No operator movement is needed or used. We compositionally interpret RCs, which only requires interpreting predicates in different voices but not variable binding operators or bound variables. This yields a new analysis of the “Subjects Only” constraint in Malagasy. Further, Malagasy’s rich voice system suggests a cognitive trigger for the use of variable binding operators in RCs in voice-poor languages such as English.