Speaker: Jim McCloskey (UC Santa Cruz)
Title: Further Reflections on Movement and Resumption
Time: Friday, October 9, 2009, 3:30pm
Place: 32-141
The syntax of apparently unbounded dependencies in Irish has for long been viewed as providing evidence for the (successive) cyclic view of long WH-movement, and also as making available a rich set of puzzles by which the nature of such movement operations could be probed. In Irish, this set of puzzles is further enriched by the relatively free availability of resumption as an additional option for forming A-bar binding relations. This paper (a progress report in a long-running struggle) is concerned with a couple of inter-related questions in this area: (i) how we should understand the choice between resumption and movement and what the availability of that choice implies (ii) how the choice, once made, is reflected in the morphosyntax of the language. At stake ultimately is the fundamental question of how we should understand locality requirements in syntax.