Whamit!

The Weekly Newsletter of MIT Linguistics

Ling-lunch 11/6 - Jeremy Hartman

Please join us for this week’s Ling-lunch:

Thursday, Nov. 6
12:30-1:45
Room 32-D461

Jeremy Hartman
“The Semantic Effects of non-A’ Traces: Evidence from Ellipsis Parallelism”

A central puzzle in the syntax/semantics interface concerns the interpretation of movement. A-bar movement has evident semantic consequences, but the status of A-movement and head-movement is less evident—with the result that some authors have called these types of movement into question, or relegated them to the phonological component of the grammar. This talk presents evidence from ellipsis parallelism that all three types of movement have effects on semantics.

Takahashi and Fox (2005) and Merchant (2008) propose that ellipsis is subject to a constraint “MaxElide” that prefers a larger elided constituent over a smaller one, within a given Parallelism Domain determined by semantic identity to an antecedent. I examine new data concerning the interactions of MaxElide with wh-adverbials, embedded clauses, and T-to-C movement. I present and account for an expanded MaxElide paradigm by arguing that all types of traces (A-traces, A-bar traces, and traces of head movement) count towards the calculation of the Parallelism Domain.