Whamit!

Speaker: Jeroen van Craenenbroeck (KU Brussels)
Title: Ellipsis and accommodation: the (morphological) case of sluicing
Time: Friday, April 3, 2009, 3:30pm
Place: 32-141

In this talk I examine instances of sluicing whereby the ellipsis site is not structurally isomorphic to its antecedent. The data are presented in three incremental steps: (1) copular clauses can be used in sluicing to circumvent preposition stranding violations in non- preposition stranding languages; (2) such copular rescue is blocked in languages with morphological case marking; (3) this blocking is overruled when (a) the underlying copular clause is case-sensitive, or (b) the sluiced wh-phrase is syncretic between the case assigned by the preposition and the case found in a copular clause. As none of the existing constraints on accommodation of ellipsis antecedents (Fox 1999, 2000; Sauerland 2004; Hardt 2004, 2005) can account for this data pattern, I propose a new constraint, which states that an ellipsis remnant has to be in the licensing potential (cf. Chung, Ladusaw and McCloskey 1995) of both the actual and the accommodated antecedent. This proposal will be shown to receive support from pragmatically controlled sluicing and the interaction between spading and morphological case in dialect Dutch.

Phonology circle returns next week with a talk by Diana Apoussidou. The schedule for the remainder of the semester is as follows:

4/6 Diana Apoussidou
4/13 Bronwyn Bjorkman
4/20 Patriots Day
4/27 Eulàlia Bonet
5/4 Peter Graff
5/11 Jelena Krivokapi?

Joey Sabbagh (PhD 2005), who has been teaching at Berkeley and Reed, has accepted a position as Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the University of Texas/Arlington. Joey’s dissertation discussed Non-verbal argument structure : evidence from Tagalog and his most recent publication is an article in Linguistic Inquiry on Right Node Raising and Extraction in Tagalog. Congratulations, Joey!!

This week’s Ling Lunch presentation has been cancelled— Ling Lunch will resume next Thursday with a talk by Shigeru Miyagawa.