Abstract for Ricahrd larson, Chris Collins, Marcel den Dikken, and Mark Baker's talk

Talkes of the Missing Link
Ricahrd larson, Chris Collins, Marcel den Dikken, and Mark Baker (NYU/CUNY)
March 3, 2006 (Friday)
10:00 AM - 4:00 AM; NYU, Silver Center 713

This conference will focus on recent work in linking constructions, including at least the following phenomena:

a. The verbal linker found in the non-central Khoisan languages and Kinande.
b. The nominal linkers found in Japanese (-no/-i/-na), Chinese (de), French (de) and Thai (thii)
c. The Ezafe constructions found in Modern Persian, Kurdish and Zazaki
d. The associative constructions found in the Niger-Congo languages

The questions that will be investigated at this conference include the following:

a. How are linkers different from prepositions? From Case markers? Are linkers semantically empty?
b. What role do linkers play in word order? Do they provide landing sites for movement?
c. What role do linkers play in Case assignment?
d. What kinds of cross-linguistic variation characterize each of the domains where linkers are found? Which languages allow multiple linker constructions, and are there special constraints on these?
e. How does agreement work in linker constructions?

For more info, visit the conference web page.