Talk at TEAL

I’ve just returned from this year’s Workshop on Theoretical East Asian Linguistics (TEAL-14), hosted by the University of Southern California. Thank you to Andrew Simpson and to everyone else at USC for such an exciting conference!

Justin Leung (Toronto) and I presented a joint talk, titled “A (de)prepositional approach to directed motion predicates in Cantonese and Hmong” (abstract follows).

In many East and Southeast Asian languages, the syntactic category of directed motion predicates is a subject of ongoing debate: some authors claim them to be verbal (e.g., Paul 2022) and others prepositional (e.g., Hu 2022). This paper examines two unrelated languages, Hong Kong Cantonese (HKC; Sino-Tibetan) and White Hmong (WH; Hmong-Mien, Laos), both of which provide evidence that DMPs are underlyingly prepositional. We argue that verbal and prepositional uses of path predicates derive from variability in the lexicalization of a consistent underlying syntax (Hu 2022, Acedo-Matellán & Kwapiszewski 2024, a.o.).