Time：April 24th, 201914:00-16:00

Location：109 Building 1

Yangyu SUN:

(Università degli Studi di Padova, Italy)

Low IP periphery in Chinese: the Mandarin ba-construction

This presentation will talk about the syntactic properties of the “ba-construction” Mandarin Chinese under new theoretical frameworks. By introducing the event-decomposition method proposed by Ramchand (2008), I argue that the ba-construction conveys the causativity and the resultativity of the event at the same time. Then, assuming that it is a functional head, I will show a “position test” of the marker ba and the result indicates that ba is a voice head in the hierarchy of functional projections proposed by Cinque (1999, 2006).

Yangyu Sun is PhD candidate at the University of Padua under the supervision of Prof. Cecilia Poletto. Her main interestis involve Cartogranphy and Chinese Syntax. She is analumnaof BLCU.

Hiroshi KUBO:

(Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Japan)

How do you call it? The case of persimmon (Diospyros kaki) in Italy

The main purpose of the talk is to show the diatopic variation in Italy, with special focus on the case of persimmon, called Shìzi in Mandarin Chinese. In standard Italian, the fruit is called [kaːki], which is derived from Japanese [kaki]. I will show that there are some variants of the name of this fruit in different regions in Italy. I will also show some evidence which proves that the variation occurred between 1870 and 1950. This study could be an example of the fact that a linguistic variation occurs in only few decades in an unexpected way.

Dr. Hiroshi Kubo is lecturer at the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. He recently discussed his PhD dissertation at the University of Padua on diachronic aspects of vowel insertion in Romance under the supervision of Prof. Vanelli.