Whamit!

The Weekly Newsletter of MIT Linguistics

Syntax Square 9/16 - Coppe van Urk

Speaker: Coppe van Urk (MIT)
Title: Why Dutch is like Salish: On the nature of the EPP
Date/Time: Tuesday, Sept 16, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461

This talk discusses some syntactic environments in Dutch in which Locative Inversion appears to be obligatory (Hoekstra and Mulder 1990; Zwart 1991). I show that this pattern generalizes and that locative expressions, particularly locative proforms, may be used to satisfy the EPP property of Spec-IP. I relate this to the claim, developed by Ritter and Wiltschko (2009) on the basis of Salishan languages, that Infl may have locative content, and I offer a modification of the Ritter and Wiltschko proposal that accommodates the Dutch facts. If on the right track, this proposal suggests that the EPP is a property of a head (Landau 2006; Richards 2014), rather than a property of a single feature (Chomsky 1995; Pesetsky and Torrego 2001).