CrISP SPONSORS TWO TALKS BY AD NEELEMAN THIS NEXT WEEK

There will be two talks this week by Ad Neeleman (University College London), both organized by the Cross-Linguistic Investigations in Syntax-Phonology (CrISP) research group. On Wednesday, May 15th (10:30-12 am, Stevenson 249), he will give an informal workshop presentation titled “e” (see abstract below). On Thursday, May 16th (4-5:30, Humanities 1 Room 210), he will give a colloquium titled “Person: Inventory and Realization”. You can find the abstract for this talk here.

Abstract for May 15 workshop talk: The copy theory of movement (Chomsky 1995), in conjunction with the fact that traces are phonologically empty, forces a filler-driven parsing strategy for movement. We argue that this parsing strategy in turn explains certain asymmetries between leftward and rightward movement, on the assumption that empty branches must be located at the leading edge of the parse. In particular, non-string-vacuous rightward movement of obligatory material causes parsing difficulties, because it requires that an empty branch is pushed away from the leading edge before it can be filled by a copy of the moved constituent. We consider two rightward movements: heavy-NP shift and rightward movement of N (or N+A) in the extended nominal protection.