Josh Phillips presents at NELS

At the 50th meeting of the North East Linguistic Society at MIT, PhD candidate Josh Phillips presented some of his work on privatives in Australian languages. Josh’s poster, entitled ““Privative case” : displacement & renewal in the negative domain”, discusses forms with a meaning like ‘without’ or ‘-less’ in several Australian languages. He argues that these are undergoing a change so that they can attach to verbs as well as nouns, and provides a semantic description of the forms which is consistent with this changing usage. A consequence of this is that the negative existential cycle (described elsewhere in the literature on grammaticalization and language change) is analyzed as an expansion in the quantification domain of a negative operator.