Milena Šereikaitė gave a talk at Georgetown Speaker Series.

Photograph of Milena Šereikaitė
February 28, 2022

In this talk, Milena examines properties of complex event nominalizations (CENs) and passives in Lithuanian, and what they can tell us about Case Theory and the typology of Voice more broadly. Since the seminal work of Grimshaw (1990), CENs, just like passives, have been claimed to demote an external argument. She provides novel evidence from Lithuanian showing that CENs do not include passivization. Both CENs and passives have a thematic VoiceP that introduces an external argument theta-role. Nevertheless, CENs differ from passives in that they have a projected external argument whereas passives lack it (Sichel 2009, 2010; Bruening 2013). CENs have been claimed to exhibit an ergative case marking (Alexiadou 2001, Salanova 2007), which is the result of the presence of a passive-like Voice (Alexiadou 2017). She counterexemplifies this claim by showing that Lithuanian CENs display two structurally distinct genitives, a possessive genitive and a non-possessive genitive, that are equivalent to a nominative-accusative case pattern found in active transitive clauses.

Author: