RESCHEDULED – Steven Foley (University of Southern California)

Unfortunately, Steven has had to postpone their talk planned for October 12, 2023. The talk has been rescheduled for December 14, 2023.

Inverted agents and demoted goals in Georgian

Case marking in Georgian transitive clauses differs across tense categories. Most strikingly, external arguments in perfect tenses “invert”: they appear in dative case and control erstwhile indirect-object agreement; would-be dative indirect objects are “demoted” to non-agreeing PPs. Nevertheless, evidence from the anticausative alternation, voice-sensitive allomorphy, and the person–case constraint indicates that (di)transitive clauses are syntactically identical across tenses, whatever their surface case alignment. This implicates a model of morphosyntax where abstract case categories can be spelled out according to rules sensitive to the structural configuration of DPs and functional heads.