Toosarvandani at UCLA

This past Friday, Professor Maziar Toosarvandani gave a colloquium in the Department of Linguistics at UCLA. His talk on “Representing animacy in the grammar”, reported some recent results relating to the ongoing NSF funded project on animacy and resumption. The abstract for his talk is below:

We are used to thinking about person, number, and gender as features to which the grammar is sensitive. But the place of animacy is less familiar, despite its robust syntactic activity in many languages. I investigate the pronominal system of Southeastern Sierra Zapotec, identifying an interpretive parallel between animacy and person. Third person plural pronouns, which encode a four-way animacy distinction in the language, exhibit a cluster of interpretive properties I call “associativity”; these have been argued also to characterize first and second person plural pronouns. Building on Kratzer’s (2009) and Harbour’s (2016) theories of person, I propose a plurality-based semantics for animacy that captures their shared properties. The compositional mechanism underlying this semantics ties person and animacy features to a single syntactic position inside the noun phrase. This enables an understanding of these features’ shared relevance to syntactic operations, including those underlying pronoun cliticization.

While down south, Maziar had the opportunity to catch up with fellow Oto-Mangueanist Ben Eischens (PhD, 2022), who is now on the linguistics faculty at UCLA.