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Graduate Program in Linguistics at the City University of New York

Tales of the Missing Link (Download the flyer)

Date: Friday, March 3, 2006
Time: 9:25am - 4:00pm
Location: NYU, Silver Center 713
(for directions see campus map at: http://www.nyu.edu/about/virtual.html)

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

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

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

  • How are linkers different from prepositions? From Case markers? Are linkers semantically empty?
  • What role do linkers play in word order? Do they provide landing sites for movement?
  • What role do linkers play in Case assignment?
  • 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?
  • How does agreement work in linker constructions?

    •  

    Schedule

    9:25 - 9:30
    		 Opening Remarks (Organizers)
    9:30 - 10:10
    		 Richard Larson "On DP and VP"
    10:10 - 10:30
    		 Discussion
    10:30 - 11:10
    		 Vick Carstens TBA
    11:10 - 11:30
    		 Discussion
    11:30 - 12:10
    		 Chris Collins "Cross-Linguistic Variation in Khoisan Linkers"
    12:10 - 12:30
    		 Discussion
    12:30-2:00
    		 LUNCH
    2:00 - 2:40
    		 Arsalan Kahnemuyipour "Some thoughts on the (missing) Ezafe"
    2:40 - 3:00
    		 Discussion
    3:00 - 3:30
    		 Marcel den Dikken, discussant
    3:30 - 4:00
    		 Mark Baker, discussant

     

    Background References:

    Baker, Mark and Chris Collins. (to appear). Linkers and vP Structure. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, volume 24.

    Collins, Chris. 2004. The Absence of the Linker in Double Object Constructions in N|uu. Studies in African Linguistics, 33.2.

    Collins, Chris. 2003. The Internal Structure of vP in Ju|’hoan and Hoan. Studia Linguistica 57.1, 1-25.

    den Dikken, Marcel and Pornsiri Singhapreecha. 2004. Complex noun phrases and linkers. Syntax 7.1, 1-54.

    den Dikken, Marcel. (to appear March 2006). Relators and Linkers. The Syntax of Predication, Predicate Inversion, and Copulas (March 2006). MIT Press, Cambridge.

    Ghomeshi, Jila (1997) “Non-projecting Nouns and the Ezafe Construction in Persian,” Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 15: 729-788.

    Holmberg, Anders and David Odden (2005) The Izafe and NP structure in Hawrami. Durham Working Papers in Linguistics 10: 77-94.

    Kahnemuyipour, Arsalan . (2000) "Persian Ezafe Construction Revisited: Evidence for Modifier Phrase ," in Jensen, John T and Gerard van Herk (eds.) Cahiers Linguistique d'Ottawa, proceedings of the 2000 annual conference of the Canadian Linguistic Association,173-185.

    Kahnemuyipour, Arsalan and Diane Massam (to appear) "Patterns of phrasal movement: The Niuean DP," in Gaertner, Hans-Martin, Law, Paul and Joachim Sabel (eds.) Clause Structure and Adjuncts in Austronesian Languages (working title), Mouton de Gruyter.

    Larson, Richard and Hiroko Yamakido (2005) Ezafe and the deep position of nominal modifiers. Paper presented at the Barcelona Workshop on Adjectives and Adverbs, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain. (March 18, 2005).

    Larson, Richard and Hiroko Yamakido (2006) Zazaki “Double Ezafe” as Double Case-marking. Paper presented at the Linguistics Society of America annual meetings. Aluquerque, NM. (January 8, 2006).

    Samiian, Vida (1994) “The Ezafe Construction: Some Implications for the Theory of X-bar Syntax,” in M. Marashi (ed.) Persian Studies in North America. (pp. 17-41) Betheda, MD: Iranbooks.

    Samvelian, Pollet “When morphology does better than Syntax: The Ezafe construction in Persian,”