The 28th South of England LFG meeting, a student-oriented meeting for presentations and discussion of various topics from an LFG perspective, will be held on 16 November in Room L67 (basement), SOAS main building, Russell Square, London. PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS IS NOT THE USUAL ROOM. The list of presentations is below. More information can be found at the main SE-LFG site: sg.sg/se-lfg (or https://sites.google.com/site/selfgmeetings/home/). We look forward to welcoming you to the meeting!

Meeting agenda:

11:00: Dávid Győrfi, University of Surrey: Towards a typology of complex predicates in Turkic

Complex predicates in Turkic languages involve serial verb, auxiliary verb and light verb constructions, including instances ‘in between’ and a great deal of morphosyntactic flexibility. This presentation shows some interesting variation in these syntactic constructions.

12:00: Mike Franjieh, University of Surrey: Transitivity and secondary predicates in Fanbyak (Oceanic, Vanuatu)

This talk focusses on the difference between three distinct classes of verb in Fanbyak – (i) morphosyntactic and semantically intransitive verbs, (ii) morphosyntactic and semantically transitive verbs and (iii) morpho-syntactically intransitive yet semantically transitive verbs. I discuss the interesting interplay between these three verb classes, object incorporation and transitivity altering secondary predicates.

2:30: Nadia Christopher, University of Surrey: Kazakh topic markers bolsa and degen

During my PhD research I identified three topic markers in Kazakh: še, bolsa, and degen. Corpus data analysis shows that the particle še has almost completely switched from its contrastive topic marking function to that of a contrastive question particle. In view of this, the talk will focus on wordforms bolsa and degen, which are widely used as topic markers. It would be interesting to think about a potential LFG analysis of these items, especially since both these wordforms have other (non-topic marking) uses in the language.

3:30: Matthew Gotham, University of Oxford: Constraining scope ambiguity in LFG+Glue

A major strength of the Glue approach to semantic composition for LFG is that it accounts for quantifier scope ambiguity without the need for additional assumptions. However, quantifier scope is more rigid in some languages and constructions than Glue would lead us to expect. I propose a mechanism for constraining scope ambiguity in LFG+Glue, based on ideas taken from Abstract Categorial Grammar.

4:45: Agnieszka Patejuk, University of Oxford and Institute of Computer Science, Polish Academy of Sciences: Predicative adverbs

This talk argues for the existence of predicative adverbs on the basis of data from Polish, where such adverbs are used when the item predicated of is clausal: an infinitival phrase or a complementiser phrase.