Speaker: Omri Doron (MIT)
Title: Hebrew nominal sentences wear their reconstruction on their sleeve
Time: Wednesday, April 19th, 1pm – 2pm
Abstract: Hebrew nominal sentences (with NP/AP as a predicate) sometimes contain what looks like a pronoun between the subject and the predicate (“Pron”), which agrees with the subject:
(1) dana (hi) gvoa
Dana (Pron.3FSG) tall
“Dana is tall”
Doron (1983) analyzes Pron as the realization of agreement features in I⁰, which is still considered the standard analysis of Pron. I point out that this analysis is unable to account for Pron’s complicated distribution and interpretative effects, and argue for an alternative analysis of Pron as a resumptive pronoun. I then show that Pron’s syntactic properties can be used to test different hypotheses in the literature regarding reconstruction effects.