Speaker: Jim McCloskey (UCSC)
Title: Phasehood, the Maximal Verbal Projection and Preverbs in Irish
Date/Time: Thursday, September 18th, 5:15-6:45 pm
Location: 34-101
Please note the special time, date and place for this talk.
The direct object relation is a relation of central importance in
syntactic theory and so it was an important moment when the nature of
that relation was fundamentally re-thought in work of the 1990’s. This
paper examines some of the issues raised in that re-thinking, by
looking closely at the expression of the direct object relation in
Irish (infinitival) clauses. It focuses in particular on what is to
be learned from an intricate pattern of dialectal, idiolectal, and
generational variation which, it is claimed, sheds light on how we
should understand `Burzio’s Generalization’, which is itself a central
aspect of theories of objecthood which derive from Government Binding
Theory.