Kirill Shklovsky
Person-Case Effects in Tseltal
Person-Case Constraint (PCC) is a restriction on the nature of the direct object argument in the presence of an indirect object: in many languages, the the direct object in a ditransitive construction can only be third person (Bonet, 1991). Tseltal, a Mayan language of southern Mexico, exhibits PCC restrictions not only in with ditransitive verbs but also in a construction involving non-finite complement embedded under an intransitive verb. Curiously, the restriction is not in effect when the same non-finite complement is embedded under a transitive verb. In this talk I will show that the phenomenon can be accounted for using theories of PCC in Béjar and Rezac (2003) and Anagnostopoulou (2003) in combination with inherent case theory of ergative case (Woolford (1997), Legate (2008)). This should provide support for the idea that ergative is inherent case in Tseltal. The rest of this talk will deal with case-assignment and agreement in non-finite complement clauses.
Ivy Sichel
Economy and the Interpretation of Pronominals
Natural languages use pronominal material for a variety of purposes which extend beyond the ordinary use of pronouns to denote independent theta-roles. In some of these other uses, pronominal material appears to double another DP, including, for example, resumptive pronouns and agreement. The talk addresses how these forms are interpreted, and in particular whether the pronominal form allows reconstruction of its associated DP. The central claim is that form alone does not determine interpretation, and that the existence of alternatives does to a significant extent. The first part of the talk demonstrates this for resumptive pronouns and focuses on a correlation between interpretation and extraction. In non-island contexts, Hebrew has optional and obligatory resumptive pronouns. Optional resumptives block reconstruction of the RC head and also block extraction from the RC; obligatory resumptives allow reconstruction and also allow extraction, exactly like traces. I argue that (1) The possibility for reconstruction depends on the structure of the RC, and in particular the division into Matching and Raising RCs (Bhatt 2002; Sauerland 2004; Hulsey & Sauerland 2006), and (2) that the structure associated with reconstruction is best realized with a trace and is realized with a pronoun only if no trace alternative is available. The second part of the talk extends the alternatives-based analysis to agreement in Palestinian Arabic (PA). PA exhibits an alternation between full-Agr and no-Agr, and clauses with full-Agr lack inverse scope readings, analyzed as absence of reconstruction. This is related to the availability of an alternative structure in which agreement is absent, the surface position of the subject is low and its scope is fixed at that position.
Norvin Richards
Nothing is improper
"I'll propose a new locality condition on A-movement, which will take the form of a restriction on how the results of Spell-out can be reassembled at LF. The condition will rule out the ill-formed cases of improper movement, while allowing certain cases of improper movement to take place. The main example of this last type will be tough-movement, and the new locality condition will also constrain the behavior of tough-movement."
Artemis Alexiadou, Universität
Stuttgart
Backward control revisited
In this paper we examine Control constructions in Greek and Romanian in the light of the (debate around the) movement analysis of Control.
We first address two main counterarguments raised in Landau (2007) against the movement analysis of Control, and especially against the phenomenon of Backward Control (BC). We show that unlike the situation described in Tsez (Polinsky & Potsdam 2002), Landau's objections do not hold for Greek and Romanian, where all obligatory control verbs exhibit BC.
We then address a more recent challenge to the phenomenon of BC provided by Szabolcsi (2009). On the basis of a comparative examination of Greek/ Romanian vs. Hungarian we argue that Greek and Romanian indeed have BC (adding a further argument to the control-as-movement analysis).
We finally discuss an asymmetry between subject BC (possible) as opposed to object BC (impossible) in Greek and Romanian, which presents a serious challenge for the movement analysis of BC.
Jonah Katz & David Pesetsky
The Identity Thesis for Language and Music
This paper argues for the following proposal:
Identity Thesis for Language and Music: All formal differences between language and music are a consequence of differences in their fundamental building blocks (arbitrary pairings of sound and meaning in the case of language; pitch-classes and pitch-class combinations in the case of music).† In all other respects, language and music are identical.
In particular, we argue, developing but also extending earlier proposals by Lerdahl and Jackendoff (1983), that music, like language, contains a syntactic component in which headed structures are built by iterated, recursive, binary Merge. This is the component that Lerdahl and Jackendoff called Prolongational Reduction, which represents hierarchical patterns of tension and relaxation in tonal harmony. We further argue that the distinct component that Lerdahl and Jackendoff called Time Span Reduction is a musical prosodic component (a point anticipated by Lerdahl and Jackendoff themselves) -- whose interface with the syntactic component is strikingly similar to the comparable interface between syntactic and prosodic structure in language.
Though our discussion takes Lerdahl and Jackendoff's work as a starting point and touchstone throughout, our proposals also constitute a significant realignment of their model -- necessary in order to reveal similarities between musical and linguistic structure that were not evident in their presentation.† This realignment also reflects a distinction in goals between our proposal and theirs. Their work took as its starting point the question "Given a piece of music in a particular musical idiom I, what laws govern the class of analyses that a listener assigns to it in I?" Our proposals arise from a related but distinct question, more typical of generative linguistic work: "What general laws define the class of possible pieces in I?" That is, what is the grammar of I?
Our realignment of Lerdahl and Jackendoff's proposals in light of the Identity Thesis allows us to ask questions not taken up in their work. For example, does Internal Merge (i.e. syntactic movement) apply in the construction of musical syntactic structure, in addition to External Merge? We argue that the phenomenon of cadence is an instance of exactly this: head-movement from the penultimate constituent of a musical passage (the dominant) to the final tonic chord.
Finally, we will suggest (but probably not have time to argue) that the output of musical syntax feeds a Tonal-Harmonic Component whose formal relation to the music syntax strongly resembles the relation between linguistic syntax and the semantic system that interacts with it -- and is subject to a Principle of Full Interpretation with respect to that component.
(A draft of a paper related to this talk is available on LingBuzz at http://ling.auf.net/lingBuzz/000959.)
