[LFG] 19th South of England LFG meeting: Saturday, 20 February 2016, Room 4426, SOAS main building, Russell Square, London

[Mary Dalrymple]

The 19th South of England LFG meeting will take place on Saturday, 20 February 2016, in Room 4426, SOAS, London.  The list of presentations is below.  More information can be found at the main SE-LFG site: sg.sg/se-lfg (or https://sites.google.com/site/selfgmeetings/home/).

We look forward to welcoming you to the meeting!

Peter Austin, SOAS: Constructive morphology beyond case marking

Nordlinger (1997, 1998) argues that in certain dependent marking non-configurational languages case morphology does not merely reflect grammatical functions but can have a role in constructing them. She shows how f-structures can be constructed from the case-marked forms of nouns, including instances of double case-marking and use of case to encode TAM properties. In this paper I extend Nordlinger's proposals beyond case-marking to cover certain constructions in Australian Aboriginal languages where it can be argued that dependent verbal and nominal morphology constructs rather more complex f-structure representations, including information about functional control. Data from Mantharta and Kanyara languages will be provided to support this analysis. 

Jamie Findlay, Oxford: Idioms in LFG

Idiomatic expressions come in a variety of types: some are syntactically fixed, such as by the by, while others are relatively flexible, such as pull strings, which allows all manner of manipulations (pull political strings; strings were pulled; the strings that were pulled, etc.) while still retaining its idiomatic meaning. At first blush, such multi-word expressions pose a challenge to a lexicalist theory such as LFG, since it seems that phrasal level ‘constructions’ must have some place in the lexicon in order to account for them. In this presentation, I will give an overview of (some of) the complex data surrounding idioms, before exploring one potential direction of analysis which builds on the work of Asudeh et al. (2013) on constructions. 

Kersti Börjars, Khawla Ghadgoud and John Payne, Manchester, Differential object marking in Libyan Arabic

In Libyan Arabic, direct objects can be either plain, as in (1a), or preceded by the differential object marker fi, as in (1b):

1.	a.	Ahmed     kle			el-kosksi
Ahmed     eat.PST.3MSG	DEF-couscous
‘Ahmed ate couscous.’

2.	b.	Ahmed      yakil               	fi      	el-kosksi 
Ahmed       eat.NONT.3MSG	DOM	DEF-couscous 
‘Ahmed is eating couscous.’

In another function, fi is the locative preposition “in”. The differential object marker fi is licensed when (a) the governing verb is dynamic, and (b) it takes the non-tensed form (regardless of the actual time reference of the clause). An interesting complication is that the occurrence of fi is blocked when a dynamic verb in the non-tensed form is subordinated to a verb which is itself stative. In this paper, we provide an LFG analysis of the interaction between aspectual and formal features which the licensing of fi entails. 

Eleanor Ridge, SOAS, title to be confirmed

Joey Lovestrand, Oxford, title to be confirmed