Steven Foley from NYU will give the following talk at 2:30pm in the Partee Room on Friday, November 15.
Relative Clauses in Georgian
Georgian is notable for exhibiting many relativization strategies.
Relative clauses may contain a wh-phrase, or the complementizer rom,
which occurs in a non-initial position; they may occur directly after
the modified nominal head, extraposed to the right edge of the matrix
clause, or preposed in a correlative construction; the nominal head
may appear inside the relative, outside it, or both. Despite this
variation, I propose that all relative clauses in Georgian are derived
from a single underlying structure, with the relative CP generated as
the complement of D/N (Kayne 1994, Hulsey & Sauerland 2006). The whole
array of relative clauses and their asymmetries are derived through a
combination of an articulated left periphery and movement through
escape hatches provided by Phase extension (Bobaljik & Wurmbrand
2005). Such a unified account challenges analyses of very similar
phenomena in Hindi by Mahajan (2000) and Bhatt (2003).
