S-Lab - John Gluckman / Embedded clauses and the stage/individual distinction
S-Lab - John Gluckman / Embedded clauses and the stage/individual distinction
Tuesday April 12, S-Lab welcomes virtual guest John Gluckman, Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Kansas University, who will give a talk on the two copulas in Kinyamulenge, a Bantu language.
Embedded clauses and the stage/individual distinction
Embedded clauses often have restrictions on their embedded environments, affecting mood, “point-of-view” (logophoricity, indexicality), modality, information structure, among other things. I’ll talk about an undiscussed restriction in embedded clauses which affects copular predication. In Kinyamulenge, a Bantu language of the Democratic Republic of Congo, there is a copular distinction between individual-level and stage-level predicates, reminiscent of more familiar systems like Spanish’s ser/estar copulas. However, in embedded clauses headed by the complementizer kó, only the stage-level copula is found, even with individual-level adjectives. Clauses headed by the complementizer ngo have no such restriction. To explain this pattern, I’ll build on two recent lines of research. The first concerns the semantics of the stage/individual contrast: stage-level copulas are felicitous in particular semantic environments (Deo et al, 2016; among others). I’ll propose that kó-clauses, and not ngo-clauses, provide precisely the right semantic environment, making a connection to recent work on Indo-European mood (Giannakidou & Mari, 2021; Mari & Portner, 2021). The explanation has implications for the overall distribution and meaning contribution of the two different complementizers. Finally, while the approach pursued here takes a decidedly semantic view, we’ll also explore how there might be a syntactic source as well.