Speaker: Ivan Sag (Stanford)
Title: Sex, Lies, and the English Auxiliary System
Location: 32-D461
Time: Thursday, Oct 6, 12:30-1:45p
Ever since the grammar of the English auxiliary system presented in LSLT/Syntactic Structures, it has been widely believed that movement operations must be part of grammatical theory. Moreover, it is generally accepted within Minimalism and related fields informed by it that human biology determines that movement rules are ‘structure dependent’. I will show why both of these claims are false. In addition, the construction-based analysis of the auxiliary system that I will present treats generalizations and exceptions that have never been properly analyzed (or else have not been analyzed at all) in transformational terms.