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Interactions Across Hawaiian Valency Morphology

Date:
-
Location:
https://uky.zoom.us/j/89000885646
Speaker(s) / Presenter(s):
David J. Medeiros

Verbal constructions take different numbers of arguments depending on their morpho-syntax context. For example, causative constructions increase the number of arguments, while passive constructions decrease the number of arguments. Nominalization can also affect argument structure in a number of ways. In this talk, I discuss Hawaiian, which expresses argument structure change via productive morphology, including causatives, nominalizers, and passives. I discuss interactions among these morphemes revealed by corpus analysis, and I argue that certain forms which are traditionally considered to be separate morphemes are instead allomorphs, the surface form of which is conditioned by morpho-syntactic context. I model these interactions within the 'syntax all the way down' approach of Distributed Morphology.