Colloquium: Abigail Bimpeh
On Tuesday, December 4th at 4pm in SH 3.104, Abigail Bimpeh will be giving a talk in the GK colloquium.
Title: On (anti)logophoricity in Ewedomegbe
Abstract:
It has been established in the literature that attitude reports are a necessary environment for logophoricity cross linguistically (e.g. Culy 1994a, Schlenker 1999, among others). In this talk, exploring Culy’s (1994) hierarchy of logophoric predicates, I show that for Ewedomegbe (the northern variety of Ewe spoken in Ghana), the licensing element is the complementizer be which seems to have developed from the verb be ‘say’. Upon a cursory look at the logophoric paradigms, I propose the regular third person pronoun, é, to be an anti-logophor, in the sense that in Ewedomegbe, unlike in English (e.g. Chierchia 1986), Japanese (e.g. Oshima 2006), Jula (Kiemtoré in prep), inter alia, the third person pronoun cannot be co-referential with the ‘subject of consciousness’ in a logophoric domain (Culy 1994a, Kaiser 2008). Also, following Bimpeh (2018, submitted) which supports the claim that logophoric pronouns do not have a de re construal in reported speech, mistaken identity reports and dream reports, I will present my experimental design which aims at further testing this claim.