Resumption and the Design of Grammar

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• Ash Asudeh (University of Oxford & Carleton University)
• Thursday 27 October 2011, 17:00-18:30
• Latimer Room, E Staircase, Clare College Old Court.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact George Walkden.

This talk uses the empirical phenomenon of resumption as a lens to examine the design of grammar. I present a general hypothesis called the Resource Sensitivity Hypothesis (RSH), which places a certain specific constraint on the language system. I demonstrate that various cross-theoretical proposals can be reduced to RSH . Based on RSH , I develop the Resource Management Theory of Resumption (RMTR), which treats resumption as irreducibly a problem of semantic composition. I show how RMTR , together with a certain constraint-based syntactic mechanism, achieves a unification of apparently heterogeneous grammatically licensed resumptive pronouns. I also show certain correct consequences of RMTR and their implications for the syntax-semantics interface and grammatical architecture. Time permitting, I will also show how RMTR achieves a further unification between resumptive pronouns in unbounded dependencies and copy pronouns in copy raising; both of these phenomena are, at least pre-theoretically, instances of resumption.

This talk is part of the Cambridge University Linguistic Society (LingSoc) series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• All Talks (aka the CURE list)
• Cambridge Forum of Science and Humanities
• Cambridge Language Sciences
• Cambridge University Linguistic Society (LingSoc)
• Cambridge talks
• Chris Davis' list
• Guy Emerson's list
• Language Sciences for Graduate Students
• Latimer Room, E Staircase, Clare College Old Court

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