Abstract for Corinna Anderson's talk

What are Nepali simple correlatives?
Corinna Anderson (Yale University)
February 7, 2006 (Tuesday)
6:30 PM - 8:00 PM; Room 7102, The CUNY Graduate Center

This talk explores the syntactic properties of the so-called simple correlative construction in Nepali. Analyses of correlatives in South Asian languages have recognized two different underlying positions for relative clauses (DP-adjoined and IP-adjoined) in order to accommodate both embedded relatives and sentence-initial multiple relatives. Both approaches are technically compatible with the sentence-initial simple correlatives that occur in all languages with correlatives. While there is no consensus on the representation of these more basic structures, they are generally assumed to be equivalent in meaning and pragmatic function to the embedded relatives, and to be derivationally related by optional movement in at least some cases. Nepali correlatives can also appear in both positions, but Nepali resists an optional-movement analysis to relate the IP-adjoined and DP-adjoined positions of single-headed correlatives. Several reasons, including the following, will be discussed in the talk: (a) the two positions do not share all interpretations; (b) the sentence-initial position is obligatory in certain contexts; (c) lack of evidence of movement for some correlatives (limited island effects, no reconstruction effects). Syntactic, semantic and pragmatic aspects of this question will be discussed in detail with Nepali data and placed in comparative Indo-Aryan context.