Scott AnderBois (Brown University) will give an in-person colloquium.
Title: Discourse coherence and the typology of conjunction
Abstract: Typological and formal literature on conjunction often assumes that conjunction involves a cluster of properties across different levels of the grammar (e.g. cross-categoriality, a flat syntactic structure, restrictions on extraction such as the Coordinate Structure Constraint). Although various parts of this picture have been questioned in recent decades, one less discussed part of this picture concerns potential semantic/pragmatic variation (though see Davidson 2013 for ASL, Bowler 2014 for Warlpiri, and Murray 2017 for Cheyenne for proposals calling for a weaker semantics). In this talk, I examine conjunction and related constructions in A’ingae (an isolate language of Amazonia), arguing that discourse coherence is a key factor distinguishing different conjunction constructions across and within languages. Whereas English and has been argued by Gómez-Txurruka (2003) to allow all and only coordinating coherence relations in the sense of SDRT, I show that A’ingae tuya’kaen is syntactically very similar to and, yet is more narrowly restricted to cases of Parallel. That is to say, it disallows “asymmetric” readings in which temporal or causal inferences like those in (1) are drawn:
(1a) I started to type and the power went off. [Temporal]
(b) The lights were off and I couldn’t see. [Causal]
Beyond this case study, we zoom out to consider the syntactic and coherence properties of other constructions in A’ingae that have not been traditionally considered conjunction, but which potentially should be: bridging linkage, serial verbs, clause-chaining.
[Parts of this talk draw on joint work with Shen Aguinda, Daniel Altshuler, Guillaume Guitang, Arushi Kalpande, Nathaniel Scott, and/or Wilson Silva]
