The Cognitive Science of Language lecture series next talk is taking place on Tuesday February 13, 2:30-4:20pm, location TBD. The lecture will be delivered by Dr. Adam Singerman. Dr. Singerman is an assistant professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Linguistics at Syracuse University.

Please email lingdept@mcmaster.ca if you are interested to attend.

Title: Number and posture in Tuparí: an outlier in the typology of verbal suppletion

Abstract: Tuparí, an Indigenous Brazilian language belonging to the Tupían family, exhibits number-sensitive verbal suppletion in existential verbs, verbs of motion, and TAM auxiliaries. This suppletion is consistently sensitive to the number of the nominative argument, even in cases of (derived) transitive verbs. In addition, the resultative and evidential suffixes also agree with the nominative argument in number (and in the case of the resultative there is additional “postural” agreement). The nominative orientation of Tuparí suppletion and agreement runs counter to predictions made in the Distributed Morphology literature, according to which only internal arguments (i.e., the object of a transitive verb and the subject of unaccusatives) may trigger suppletion. Typological and theoretical implications of the Tuparí pattern are discussed.