Control has long been employed as diagnostic of subjecthood: in an active embedded clause, the controllee should invariably correspond to the agent qua external argument. Yet, the very notion of subjecthood breaks down in Austronesian-type voice systems where one argument is promoted to “pivot” and triggers a particular morphological form on the verb without altering its valency: subject properties are distributed between the agent irrespective of pivothood, and the pivot irrespective of θ-role, though not in a uniform manner (Schachter...
by Zoom and in Boylston 303 (though speaker is by Zoom)
Title: Capèsset? Understanding Morphomes and Analogy across Romance
Abstract: The concept of morphomes (Aronoff 1994), patterns of paradigmatic coherence, has predominated much of the scholarship on the Romance verbal system (e.g., Maiden 2003, 2005, etc). While originally conceived of as a synchronic phenomenon that is 'uniquely morphological', much of the evidence for the existence of morphomes comes from their diachronic persistence and analogical attractiveness. This talk explores the intersection between...