Inflected infinitives in Mari: Clitics, subject agreement, or a secret third thing
Irina Burukina (University of Florida)
16.06.2025, 14:15–15:45
Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1 (Hauptgebäude), A 014
Zoom:
https://lmu-munich.zoom-x.de/j/93938720682?pwd=ZnRCV1JnL2w4SVdvMHlCTEtWL2NjZz09
Meeting ID: 939 3872 0682
Passcode: 284661
The talk focuses on infinitival clauses in Meadow Mari (Uralic; the
Morkinsko-Sernur dialect) that allow apparent subject agreement (INFL).
From an empirical perspective, I will discuss the distribution of INFL
in detail and show that (i) INFL depends on a predication relation,
i.e., it is only allowed when the embedded clause is directly predicated
of the nominal phrase that INFL matches, and (ii) its presence
correlates with the information-structure properties of the sentence.
These features of INFL distinguish Mari from other languages with
inflected infinitives, such as Hungarian and Brazilian Portuguese. From
a theoretical perspective, I will put forward two possible analyses for
INFL in Mari. First, INFL may be an instance of cliticization/clitic
doubling resulting from movement. Second, INFL may result from an
embedded Mood head being activated as a secondary licenser (using
Kalin's 2018, 2019 terminology) when the embedded subject bears the
[TOPIC] feature. I will compare the two approaches and highlight their
strengths and shortcomings.