Nominal Modification

The Research Training Group on Nominal Modification at the Goethe University Frankfurt

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Colloquium: Priscilla Adenuga and Fenna Bergsma

The GK colloquium season will kick off with our first speakers Priscilla Adenuga and Fenna Bergsma on Tuesday, October 16th, from 16-18 in SH 3.104.

Priscilla Adenuga: “Relabelling Adjunction: A modification analysis in Ògè” 

In this talk, I show that plural marking is not obligatory in Ògè because it lacks agreement; rather, it belongs to the group of languages that syntactically mark plural with the use of plural morphemes: òtóchuru, uwo, and –rin.

Read the complete abstract here: GK TalkPDF

 

Fenna Bergsma: “On the distribution of waarmee and met wat in Dutch free relatives”

In Dutch, a relative pronoun in instrumental case can be realized as waarmee ‘where.with’ or as met wat ‘with what’. Free relative constructions in which one predicate requires instrumental case and the other predicate accusative case show that the two realizations are used in different contexts. In my analysis, I combine grafting (remerging of embedded features, Van Riemsdijk 2006) with the case hierarchy in nanosyntax (Caha 2009). I argue that waarmee spells out the instrumental case as a whole. Met wat appears when certain features become available at a later stage in the derivation, and the insertion of met serves as a repair mechanism that saves the construction. The work could inform us about restrictions on change of spellout and on the nature of elements in the left periphery of the embeddded clause.

 

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