Category: Student News

Graduate students Bern Samko will defend her PhD dissertation this Wednesday (May 18). It is entitled “Syntax and information structure: The grammar of English inversions”:

The goal of this dissertation is to discern the patterns of interconnectedness between syntax and pragmatics by way of a close examination of participle preposing and VP preposing (VPP) in English. For the latter, I argue that what we call VPP is the accidental confluence of three independent components: verum focus, feature-driven movement to the left periphery, and, optionally, an intonational contour that contributes emphasis. In doing so, I bring together two analytic traditions that have rarely commented on one another: a syntactic tradition that has used VPP as a diagnostic tool rather than considering its properties sui generis, and a pragmatic one that has listed discourse effects without considering why those effects are associated with the particular form of VPP. I propose an analysis in which the familiar pragmatic G[ivenness] feature participates in the syntax as a driver of movement. This approach holds the promise of allowing a better understanding of why the properties of VPP cluster as they do, an understanding that goes beyond simply listing the relevant properties.

The defense will take place at 1:30 pm in Humanities 2 (Room 259).

This Friday (May 13), graduate student Erik Zyman will present in S-Circle on “Hyperraising to object and the mechanics of Agree”:

In English and other familiar languages, A-movement can occur out of an infinitival clause, but not out of a finite clause:

(1a) Sue₁ seems [__₁ to be embezzling money].
(1b) *Sue₂ seems [__₂ is embezzling money].

On one prominent analysis, this is because an element must bear an unvalued feature to be an eligible goal for Agree (the Activity Condition, Chomsky 2000, 2001). On this view, in (1b) — unlike in (1a) — Sue gets Case in the embedded clause and, having no more unvalued features, becomes invisible to higher A-probes such as matrix T. Here, I present novel data illustrating the Janitzio P’urhepecha (JP) “accusative + complementizer” construction (e.g., ‘They want Xumo-acc that build a house’) that strongly suggest the Activity Condition is not an inherent constraint on Agree (cf. Nevins 2004). I show that the accusative DP is in the matrix and truly A-moves out of the embedded CP (i.e., this is hyperraising, not prolepsis or object control). Crucially, a hyperraised accusative DP can be linked to a nominative floated quantifier in the embedded CP—showing that nominative Case is available in the embedded CP, but its subject A-raises out of it nonetheless, challenging the Activity Condition.

The findings have further theoretical consequences. First, I argue that existing analyses of hyperraising (e.g., Martins and Nunes 2010, Carstens & Diercks 2013, Halpert 2016, Petersen & Terzi to appear) cannot extend to the JP case, and propose that JP allows hyperraising to object but English does not because in JP, but not in English, the finite embedding C can optionally bear the feature [uD[epp]] (cf. Cable 2012). Secondly, I argue that JP hyperraising to object can be accounted for straightforwardly on an altruistic (target-driven) analysis of movement (Chomsky 2000, 2001, 2004, McCloskey 2001), but not under Greed (Bošković 1995, 2002, 2007) or Labeling (Chomsky 2013, 2015).

As usual, S-Circle will take place at 2 pm in the LCR.