Invited talk at the CLA

I was lucky enough to give the student invited talk at this year’s meeting of the Canadian Linguistic Association. Thank you to Beth MacLeod and to everyone at Carleton University for organizing.

My talk, which presented work from my (nearly, nearly finished!) dissertation, was titled “Path in Hmong: The structure of directional PPs” (abstract follows).

So-called “path predicates” in White Hmong (Hmong-Mien) have been described as having both verbal and prepositional uses. I present two novel categorial diagnostics, based on co-occurrence restrictions observed within sequences of multiple path predicates, and argue that Hmong path predicates are underlyingly prepositional in all cases. Their verbal usage, I argue, is derived by productive incorporation of prepositional Route, Source, or Goal heads (Pantcheva 2011) into v. That is, these prepositions give rise to a class of de-prepositional verbs.