The 2020-2021 colloquium series continues on Monday, March 15, with a talk by Michelle Yuan (UC San Diego), held via Zoom from 3:10-5pm. The talk is entitled "Movement in Inuktitut incorporation," and the abstract is as follows:
Previous work on the Copy Theory of Movement has shown that the realization of movement chains may, in part, be regulated by morphological well-formedness conditions, such as affixation (Landau 2006, a.o.). In this talk, I provide a case study of this idea from noun incorporation (NI) in Inuktitut (Eastern Canadian Inuit), based on my fieldwork. Incorporation in Inuktitut (and Inuit) is cross-linguistically unusual, in that a small set of verbs is obligatorily incorporating (i.e. affixal), while for most other verbs incorporation is not possible. An additional goal of this talk is therefore to further elucidate the nature of Inuit incorporation, informed by how exactly it interacts with clausal syntax.
Our starting point is a little-known observation by Johns (2009) that incorporation constructions in Inuktitut may surface with object agreement and passive morphology. I provide evidence that incorporated nominals are in fact syntactically active, thus accessible to case/agreement processes and able to undergo syntactic movement—despite surfacing within the verb complex. I analyze this pattern as a Stray Affix effect applied in the context of phrasal movement: the nominal complement of an incorporating verb is obligatorily pronounced, regardless of whether it has undergone movement, due to the affixal nature of the verb. I then extend this logic to account for some heretofore unnoticed restrictions on incorporated pronouns (building on my other work on Inuktitut clitic-doubling; Yuan 2021), and discuss possible morphological evidence for a movement analysis of control (cf. Polinsky and Potsdam 2002).