Towards a non-cartographic approach to Avar focus movement

December 12, 2013

In this talk I examine the Avar focus construction, restricting my attention to situations where focus marking brings with it a change in the morphosyntactic appearance of the verb. I argue against the popular cartographic approach to focus whereby non-syntactic, interpretative information is instantiated as a head in the functional structure of the clause, and pursue an alternative, free-merge based approach to focus movement.

Superseded by chapter 5 of my PhD thesis.

Keywords: syntax, semantics, focus, Avar

This is an invited talk at New approaches to the syntax/semantics interface, a workshop held at the University of Göttingen as part of the U4 network.

  • The slides for this talk are available.

about

I’m Pavel Rudnev, and this is my personal website. I’m a research fellow and lecturer in linguistics at HSE University in Moscow. My main area of interest is syntax and its interfaces with sound and meaning. In particular, my current research revolves around the structure of nominal expressions, agreement, case and verbal morphosyntax in East Caucasian languages, and the syntax-to-phonology mapping in Russian Sign Language.

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