Please join us for Dr. Mary Amaechi’s Brown Bag Presentation on March 13, 12pm, LRW 4018

Dr. Mary Amaechi is a visiting international researcher at ARiEAL and the Syntax Lab. She is an inaugural member of our International Scholar Award Program cohort.

Dr. Amaechi will present a paper titled “Sluicing-like constructions in Igbo.” She is a lecturer in the Department of Linguistics and Nigerian Languages at the University of Ilorin, Nigeria. She received her PhD in linguistics from the University of Potsdam, Germany in 2020. Her research interests include morphosyntax, questions related to the syntax-phonology interface, the syntax of Igbo as well as language documentation. This is a great opportunity for all of you to learn more about the cutting-edge work of one of our international visiting researchers!

Mary provided the following summary:

Sluicing has been argued not to be a unified syntactic phenomenon and that different languages use different syntactic means to arrive at the same surface form. In this talk, I provide facts from Igbo (Benue-Congo, Nigeria) based on my ongoing research at ARiEAL that support such claim. Matrix and embedded sluicing-like constructions (SLCs) in Igbo involve different syntax. Igbo seems to exhibit ‘genuine’ sluicing of the English type only in matrix clauses. However, I show that this is focus movement and not wh-movement in Igbo with the idea that not only interrogative complementizer head, but focus can license clausal ellipsis. Matrix SLCs in Igbo also appear to obey Merchant’s (2001) Sluicing-COMP generalization since the focus marker is not pronounced. Embedded SLCs, on the other hand, seem to mirror embedded questions with not allowing for focus-fronting and with the presence of the indefinite. Given the obligatory presence and nature of the pronominal subject and copula in embedded SLCs, I argue that the source of the sluice is a predicational copular clause. The complement of the copula is being displaced to a Spec,CP position in the embedded clause.