!RESCHEDULED! SIL talk by Fenna Bergsma (Fryske Akademy)

Please note this talk has been rescheduled from the original date on Thursday April 24 to Thursday May 22.

Different infinitives in Frisian

Frisian has two morphologically distinct infinitives: one ending in -e (pronounced as [ə]) and one ending in -en (pronounced as [n]). It has been argued (cf. Visser 1989, Hoekstra 1997, Bergstra 2020) that they follow the noun-verb distinction and that infinitives on -e are verbal infinitives and infinitives on -en are nominal infinitives. In this talk, I show that not all infinitives on -en behave as expected from this description, and I conclude a description with two types of infinitives does not fully capture the distribution of the infinitives. I compare the different infinitives in Frisian to the different infinitives in English, and I show that their distributions largely overlap. I briefly work towards an analysis and show predictions that follow from this.