Speaker: Jim McCloskey (UC Santa Cruz)
Title: Further Reflections on Movement and Resumption
Time: Friday, October 9, 2009, 3:30pm
Place: 32-141
The syntax of apparently unbounded dependencies in Irish has for
long been viewed as providing evidence for the (successive) cyclic
view of long WH-movement, and also as making available a rich set of
puzzles by which the nature of such movement operations could be
probed. In Irish, this set of puzzles is further enriched by the
relatively free availability of resumption as an additional option
for forming A-bar binding relations. This paper (a progress report
in a long-running struggle) is concerned with a couple of
inter-related questions in this area: (i) how we should understand
the choice between resumption and movement and what the availability
of that choice implies (ii) how the choice, once made, is reflected
in the morphosyntax of the language. At stake ultimately is the
fundamental question of how we should understand locality requirements
in syntax.