Speakers: Adam Szczegielniak (Warsaw University/Harvard University)
Title: Degree/amount relatives, equative comparatives, and, as parentheticals
Time: Thursday, December 9, 12:30-1:45pm
Location: 32-D461
In this talk I will make an attempt to show that amount relative clauses and equal comparatives (identity of amount) have a common underlying derivation involving overt raising of [d amount] (Carlson 1977, Heim 1987, Landman and Grosu 1998, Pancheva 2006, Herdan 2008). Support for this claim will come from, among other things, indirect binding in amount relatives (Sharvit 1996). Differences between fully pronounced and elided amount relatives and comparatives will be shown to stem from restrictions on recoverability in ellipsis (Johnson 2001, Lechner 2001, Szczegielniak 2008). Furthermore, I will explore the possibility that in languages like Polish ‘as parentheticals’ (Potts 2002) are closely related to both comparatives and degree relative clauses not only because all three constructions utilize the same marker ‘co’, which is a hybrid of English ‘as’ and ‘that’ (Kayne 2000), but also because it will be shown that all three constructions require overt XP movement out of the CP and/or ellipsis, which will be argued to be a result of the inherent lexical requirements imposed by the marker ‘co’.