Hazel Mitchley (6th year) presented her work titled `A new way of introducing the external argument, and its implications for bundling‘ in the Manchester Forum in Linguistics (MFiL) held on April 28-29th, 2021.
Here’s a short abstract of the talk :
I argue for the bifurcation of VoiceP into two distinct projections: one which semantically introduces the external argument (EA) variable, and one which saturates or binds that variable. Harley (2013) makes a similar argument, arguing that v is responsible for semantically introducing the EA; however, I show that languages which have an overt transitivizer, e.g. Kinande (Bantu), provide morphological evidence that verbalization and EA-introduction are carried out by distinct heads. I thus argue for a projection called the LP, situated between vP and VoiceP, which is responsible for introducing the EA variable.