Omer Preminger

at MIT Linguistics

 
 

Recent Projects

Nested Interrogatives and the Locus of [wh]

This paper discusses the behavior of certain wh-island-violating (but felicitous) constructions in Hebrew. These constructions exhibit two important characteristics: superiority effects, and a sensitivity to the distinction between short vs. long wh-movement.

An analysis is proposed, based on the assumption that in Hebrew, the relevant wh-feature resides on a head lower than C0 , but CP is still equipped with a single specifier position that can be utilized for the purpose of successive-cyclic wh-movement. The proposal is shown to account for the behavior of these constructions with respect to the aforementioned characteristics, and is supported by the existence of independent cases of A-bar movement to a position below the overt complementizer in Hebrew.

  1. Bulletdownload paper:

  2. Preminger, Omer (to appear). “Nested Interrogatives and the Locus of wh”. In E. Phoevos Panagiotidis (ed.), The Complementizer Phase: Subjects and wh-dependencies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Argument Externality

This paper examines the status of the internal vs. external argument distinction (i.e., derived vs. underived subjects) in syntax. I start by showing that none of the major existing frameworks can adequately account for the distribution of argument externality. Next, I investigate the behavior of various arguments with respect to whether they are islands while still at their base-positions. When combined with the mapping properties of these arguments, a coherent partition of arguments emerges, which is crucially different than the traditional internal vs. external division.

VP-internal checking of Case, in concert with a type of syntactic merger that induces islandhood at the point of merger (independently necessary to account for base-position islandhood), is shown to be responsible for the epiphenomenon of internal vs. external mapping. Finally, I argue that there is no real obstacle to identifying this island-inducing syntactic merger with Chomsky’s (2004) pair-merge.

This view of argument-mapping obviates the need for external argument as a formal notion, given that principles that refer to this notion can be reformulated to refer instead to Case and merger (as understood in the current proposal).

  1. Bulletdownload paper