Dear colleagues,
we have finalized the program of the inaugural Moscow LFG Meeting[1], which will take place on Saturday, April 6. All the talks will be given in English. For the Zoom link, please message the organizing committee at moscow.lfg.meeting@gmail.com[2]. We'll be pleased if you are able to attend! All presenters, especially the students, are eager for feedback. (We know that it's Easter holidays in many countries, but unfortunately we couldn't shift the date to any other times, as April and May are quite busy this year over here.)
13:00–13:15 *UTC+3* Opening Remarks
13:15–14:15 Oleg Belyaev (Lomonosov MSU / Institute of Linguistics RAS). *Constraints on spanning in LrFG* LrFG – a new non-transformational realization-based framework that combines LFG with DM assumptions by eliminating morphology as a separate module – uses spanning to allow cumulative exponence of several lexical heads by one vocabulary item. This is useful for capturing such phenomena as irregular forms and portmanteaux. However, cross- linguistically, spanning seems to be restricted. In this talk, I will discuss how this could be done in LrFG based on phenomena such as Romance preposition contraction and suspended affixation.
14:15–15:00 UTC+3 Danil Alekseev (Lomonosov MSU). *Ossetic complex predicates: an LrFG analysis* In Ossetic, like in other Iranian languages, the majority of verbal meanings are expressed by complex predicates consisting of a light verb and a nonverbal component. The NVC and the verb exhibit a great degree of unity, including sharing a single lexical stress. They can, however, be broken up by a 2nd position clitic cluster, while still having a single stress. In my talk I develop an LrFG analysis of this phenomenon, while also touching on other aspects of the syntax and prosody of Ossetic complex predictes.
15:00–15:45 UTC+3 Anna Osipova (Lomonosov MSU / Institute of Linguistics RAS). *Tatyshly Udmurt possessive noun phrases: an LFG approach* In my talk, I would like to present my attempt at LFG analysis of some phenomena related to possessive noun phrases in the Tatyshly dialect of Udmurt (Uralic, spoken in Bashkortostan, Russia), based on my own field data and some other relevant research. In Udmurt, there are two different constructions that may encode possessivity in a broad sense: the double-marking construction, used for “core” possessive relations such as kinship, part-whole, and ownership, and juxtaposition, which encodes non-referent attributive relations, e.g., material or predestination. In my analysis of double-marking possessives, I argue, based on some aspects of their distribution, that they are DPs and propose the f-structure rules that consider the general structure of the construction, possessor case variation, and some related binding phenomena. If time permits, I will also briefly present the analysis of Tatyshly Udmurt nominal juxtaposition. It will be shown that in the dialect there are diverse classes of juxtaposed modifiers, which stem from the differences in their syntactic behavior. Some juxtaposed modifiers are better analyzed as non-projective heads, as they seem to incorporate into the head noun, whereas the others may govern their own projections.
15:45–16:00 UTC+3 Coffee break
16:00–16:45 UTC+3 Milena Guseva (Lomonosov MSU). *Analyzing numeral and nominal classifiers cross- linguistically* The analysis of classifier systems, a phenomenon halfway between syntax and semantics, is a difficult task for a researcher working within LFG. Although lexical functional grammar has been applied to classifier languages for quite a long time, the topic remains largely unexplored. For example, the first works devoted to the study of Chinese within LFG have been known since 1985, but a complete and comprehensive analysis of Chinese classifiers was proposed only in 2012. * How substantial is the difference between the Chinese numeral classifiers and Mayan nominal classifiers? * Does this unusual grammatical phenomenon manifest itself more syntactically or semantically? * Is it even possible to build a unified analysis of classifiers that would be relevant for most classifier languages? I will try to answer these difficult and non-trivial questions in my talk at the conference.
16:45–17:30 UTC+3 Vadim Dyachkov (LLACAN CNRS / Institute of Linguistics RAS). *Passives without by- phrases: decomposing middle voice in Natioro* My talk deals with the properties of middle voice in Natioro, an underdescribed Gur language spoken in Burkina Faso. In Natioro, middle voice forms (whose exponent is the lengthened vowel of the perfective stem) exhibit properties similar to those of passive constructions. Like most middle voice forms in other languages of the world, Natioro middle forms also can have anticausative, detransitive, but not reflexive and reciprocal, meanings. Standard tests applied to detect the presence of the agent (agent control, licensing of instrumental adjuncts, possibility to passivize causatives) show that it is indeed present in the semantic structure. However, the agent can never be expressed overtly, and there is no construction corresponding to English by-phrases. Moreover, I show that some of the standard tests cannot be interpreted directly – for instance, the ability to license instrumentals depends entirely on the presence vs. underspecification of the agent in the structure of a given predicate, and control clauses should be analyzed as binding structures. I propose that the agent that can be conceptualized as PRO is (sometimes) present in the f-structure but not in the c-structure of a predicate and discuss some alternatives to the commonly accepted smuggling approach proposed by many authors to derive passives.