13. Wednesday, July 10, 1:30 pm (NY): "Gitksan (pre)verbs"

This talk discusses verbal, preverbal and non-verbal elements in Gitksan, an endangered Tsimshianic language of British Columbia, Canada. We will try to tease apart the syntax and semantics of complements of these elements. This is especially interesting in terms of what the label ‘preverbal’ typically means. We will see that we cannot rely on many well-known syntax/semantics diagnostics from Indo-European languages; we will need to come up with a new set of diagnostics. Yet, we will see that there is some parallelism with languages we are more familiar with.