Akku? colloquium Friday February 21 at 3:30

Faruk Akku?, University of Pennsylvania, will present Lessons from “make” causatives in Sason Arabic in the Linguistics colloquium series at 3:30 Friday February 21. An abstract follows. All are welcome!
Abstract
This talk investigates the syntax of an indirect causative construction embedded under the verb “make” in Sason Arabic, with a focus on the syntax of the embedded structure, and the syntactic and semantic status of the implicit embedded agent. I demonstrate that this construction embeds both an active and passive VoiceP despite the absence of any morphological reflex. I also contend that the implicit agent in the active complement of “make” may be introduced (i) as a full DP in Spec,VoiceP, being subject to Romance ECM-type restrictions, and thus providing striking evidence of A’-movement feeding licensing relationships, or (ii) as a free variable à la Heim (1982) generated on the Voice head itself. The latter possibility raises implications regarding licensing, suggesting that licensing of a thematic object is dissociated from the projection of a specifier