hss-seminar-08

Department of Humanities and Social Sciences

Indian Institute of Technology Ropar

HSS Seminar

Ergativity and the Micro/Macrovariation Debate

by

 Pritha Chandra

 Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Delhi, Delhi

Friday,  January 23, 2015 at 3 PM

Venue : Conference Room 1

Abstract

In this talk, I revisit the debate on micro-linguistic/dialectal and macro-linguistic/typological differences and suggest that at an abstract Internal-language level, both kinds of differences may be explained by alluding to feature value sets or pools in individual grammars. I also suggest that a feature-value analysis predicts that dialects also differ from each other in substantial, non-trivial ways. Instances of feature-driven ergative patterns in multiple languages across the globe are taken up for illustration.

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