Interdisciplinary Colloquium
Prof. Idan Landau, Tel Aviv University
As part of the department’s weekly research colloquium,
held every Thursday from 16:15 to 17:45 in the Webb Building (Room 103),
the following lecture by Prof. Idan Landau from Tel Aviv University will take place:
Back to the Base: Resumption in Hebrew without Movement
Abstract:
Resumptive pronouns (RPs) in Hebrew are productively used in relative clauses and other A-bar dependencies. In accusative and embedded nominative positions, they alternate with gaps, but in oblique and genitive positions they are obligatory. An influential proposal takes the former type of RPs to be base-generated and the latter type to be a residue of movement (“realizational RPs”); concomitantly, only the latter type is expected to display reconstruction effects. I argue that there are no realizational RPs in Hebrew – all RPs are base-generated alike. Furthermore, all RPs in the language display full reconstruction effects, even inside islands, a pattern observed across a range of Arabic dialects as well. Reconstruction is thus dissociated from movement, and is instead explained by NP-ellipsis inside the resumptive DP, now seen as an E-type pronoun. We discuss a range of syntactic and semantic discrepancies between RPs and gaps, which are inexplicable on the realizational view, but receive a natural account on the E-type analysis of RPs.
All are welcome!
