Dear all,
The Linguistics Colloquium Series is having a talk this Friday, 9/23, in Oak 112, at 4:00pm.
We would like to invite you to join us and see Prof. Danny Fox's (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) talk Late Merge and Multi-Dominance. The abstract is attached below.
Information about the speaker can be found here: http://linguistics.mit.edu/user/fox/
The Linguistics Colloquium Series is a student-organized event sponsored by the UConn Department of Linguistics and the UConn Graduate Student Senate.
We hope to see you there!
Gabriel & Paula
Abstract:
In this talk I will be looking closely at apparent non-local extraposition, such as:
I’ll [visit [a house [owned by someone __ ]] next week] who teaches at UCLA
Based on evidence from scope, sequence of tense and distribution, I will argue for a syntactic representation which involves QR of ‘a house owned by someone” and "deeply embedded late merge” (in the scope position) of the RC “who teaches at UCLA" . This form of deeply embedded late merge raises non-trivial challengers for a theory of movement based on internal merge. To meet these challenges, I will (very tentatively) suggest an alternative conception of the way movement is derived. Under this alternative the basic recursive procedure of a language generates multi-dominance representation freely with no special status for a rule of internal merge (Citko, de Vries, Johnson, i.a.). Multi-domaine representation, however, can’t be linearized freely (Nunes, Boskovic and Nunes, and others). I will suggest that this observation might serve as the starting point for thinking about locality. Specifically, if we take agreement (between heads) to be a necessary trigger for phonological “neglect”, the fact that multi-dominance requires phonological neglect can connect the locality of movement to the locality of agreement, and thereby allow us to adopt common assumptions in much recent literature that assumes internal merge.
For more information, contact: Paula Fenger at paula.fenger@uconn.edu