Whamit!

The Weekly Newsletter of MIT Linguistics

Colloquium 09/18 - Jim McCloskey

Speaker: Jim McCloskey (UCSC)
Title: Phasehood, the Maximal Verbal Projection and Preverbs in Irish
Date/Time: Thursday, September 18th, 5:15-6:45 pm
Location: 34-101

Please note the special time, date and place for this talk.

The direct object relation is a relation of central importance in syntactic theory and so it was an important moment when the nature of that relation was fundamentally re-thought in work of the 1990’s. This paper examines some of the issues raised in that re-thinking, by looking closely at the expression of the direct object relation in Irish (infinitival) clauses. It focuses in particular on what is to be learned from an intricate pattern of dialectal, idiolectal, and generational variation which, it is claimed, sheds light on how we should understand `Burzio’s Generalization’, which is itself a central aspect of theories of objecthood which derive from Government Binding Theory.