Monday, June 2nd @ 3:00 PM, Cobb 104

Nominal Licensing and vP

In this talk, I discuss aspects of nominal distribution patterns in several Bantu languages.  While Bantu languages have been claimed to lack case-licensing altogether (e.g. Harford 1985, Diercks 2012, a.o.), I outline a research path for investigating structural licensing of nominals in Bantu. Using Zulu as a starting point, I show that nominals lacking an augment morpheme (initial vowel) are restricted to certain structural positions within DP, PP, or vP. I argue that licensing at the vP-level is syntactic in nature, a form of case-licensing, connected to another morphosyntactic process that targets the vP domain: the conjoint/disjoint alternation.  At the same time, there are secondary semantic/interpretive properties that correlate with this type of licensing in Zulu. I show that beyond Zulu, we find similar nominal distribution patterns in other Bantu languages.  In  Kinande and Luganda (e.g. Progovac 1993, Hyman and Katamba 1993), for example, augment vowel distribution seems to operate on related, but non-identical principles, to Zulu.  In Otjiherero (Kavari et al 2012), augments do not seem to play a role in nominal distribution and licensing, but the tonal melodies with which nominals are marked follow the same syntactic patterns as augment distribution in languages like Zulu. The emerging picture, therefore, is one in which nominal case-licensing at the clause level seems to be closely tied to the vP domain in multiple Bantu languages.  I suggest that we can find some similar profiles to the type of interaction between structural licensing and interpretive properties that we see in Bantu in languages with more robust systems of morphological case, including Russian genitive of negation, Finnish partitives, and certain uses of genitive in Japanese dialects (e.g. de Hoop 1996, Kiparsky 1998, Partee and Borschev 2004, Ochi and Saruwatari 2014).