Whamit!

The Weekly Newsletter of MIT Linguistics

Linguistics Colloquium 3/11 - Jason Merchant

Date: Friday, March 11, 2011
Time: 3:30-5:00 PM
Place: 32-141 (PLEASE NOTE THE ROOM)
Speaker: Jason Merchant, University of Chicago
Title: Predicate/argument asymmetries, Agreement, and gender

Abstract:

Building on similar results from Romance, I show that Greek animate masc/fem noun pairs fall into three classes with respect to their behavior under ellipsis: those that license mismatches in gender in either direction (epicence nouns like jatros ‘doctor’), those that don’t alternate in either direction (e.g., adhelfos/adheli ‘brother/sister’) and those whose masc form license ellipsis of a feminine but not vice versa (e.g., pianistas/pianistria ‘pianist’). I argue that this pattern can be accounted for if masc/fem can be variously specified as (in)delible, where delible features are subject to deletion under Agreement (extending von Stechow, Heim, and others), before ellipsis resolution is computed. This analysis, unlike previous underspecificational approaches, can account for the novel observation that these alternations are found only on NPs in predicate positions, and that no noun pair alternates when the target of ellipsis is in an argument position. Finally, I demonstrate how easily this account can be implemented using LF-copy as the ellipsis identity mechanism, while mainstream LF-identity/semantic identity theories find it surprisingly difficult to capture the asymmetry.