Speaker: Giovanni Roversi (MIT)
Title: Pronouns, DPs, and Omnivorous A-movement
Time: Tuesday, October 1st, 1pm – 2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract: Some of us hope that one day we can reduce all instances of Movement to Agree. About Agree, we know that omnivorous patterns exist, where a probe will skip a more local goal to target one further away, if the less local goal has some special feature that the probe is interested in. If Movement is Agree, we should therefore expect omnivorous movement patterns, where out of two goals, a more featurally special one is favored for movement over a closer one. This is pretty much exactly what goes on in typical ?-context: in object questions, C move the wh-object and skips the closer (non-wh) subject. And indeed, were used to thinking that ?-movement can be non-local, but A-movement is strictly local. Given enough featural distinctions, however, theres no principled reason why we shouldnt expect omnivorous movement patterns to hold in the realm of pure A-movement as well (not even a little bit mixed A/?). I argue that a particular corner of Äiwoo grammar works exactly like this. Movement to spec,TP in this language favors pronouns over lexical DPs: T will skip a closer lexical DP goal to rather move an object pronoun. This also teaches us something about why and how syntax treats pronouns and full DPs differently, and I suggest that at least in this language, any explanations based on greed (this pronoun needs to move because its deficient) or any kind of licensing dont work.