Workshop on Suspended Affixation

October 26-27, 2012

Department of Linguistics, Cornell University; the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics; and Linguistics, Syracuse University

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The topic of so-called Suspended Affixation (SA) is an important and topical one, because the facts that fall under this term are located in the interface of morphology and syntax. This term refers to a phenomenon, found in many languages, but in particular in syntactically head-final and morphologically agglutinative languages, whereby in a coordination of words, some right-peripheral inflectional morphology shows up on the second conjunct only, but has scope over the first conjunct, as well; thus, that morphology is, in some sense, "suspended." This phenomenon of suspended affixation (SA) is illustrated by the Turkish examples below, where suspending the plural morpheme in (1) and copular, past tense and person agreement morphemes in (2) is perfectly grammatical:

(1)         limon    ve     portakal-lar
              lemon   and  orange-PL
             'lemon and oranges' (Non-SA-reading)
             'lemons and oranges' (SA-reading)
                                                                                                (Kornfilt and Whitman, 2001)

(2)          [Zengin   ve    ünlü]-y-dü-m.
               rich        and  famous-cop-past-1sg
              'I was rich and famous.'
                                                                                                (Lewis, 1967)

Participants
Organizers:
John Whitman, Cornell University
Jaklin Kornfilt, Syracuse University

Sponsored by:
The Upstate Humanities Corridor, Central New York; The Department of Linguistics, Cornell University; and NINJAL


Registration:
Registration is free. To register, please send an email to ek362@cornell.edu with the subject line "Registration" and your name and affiliation. Thanks!