Please join us for our next Brown Bag event of the semester on March 26, 3:30pm at LRW 4001.

Drs. Stephen Henhawk and John Whitman, both from Cornell University, will present a paper titled Preverbal Subject Placement in Gayogoho꞉nǫʔ (Cayuga). A widespread view is that the positioning of unincorporated nominal phrases in Northern Iroquoian (NI) languages is free, apart from the sentence-initial focus position identified by Williams (1974/1976: 45) for Skarò˙rə̨ ʔ (Tuscarora), Barrie et al. (2014) for Gayogoho꞉nǫʔ, and DeCaire et al. (2017) for Kanienʼkéha (Mohawk). In this talk, they show that the position for a nominal phrase between sentence-initial focus and the verb is reserved for subjects, as in fact suggested for Skarò˙rə̨ ʔ by Williams and hinted at for Kanienʼkéha by Bonvillain (1985).