{"id":16884,"date":"2025-02-18T05:55:10","date_gmt":"2025-02-18T10:55:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/whamit.mit.edu\/?p=16884"},"modified":"2025-02-18T10:21:32","modified_gmt":"2025-02-18T15:21:32","slug":"newman-nice-locality-workshop","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/2025\/02\/18\/newman-nice-locality-workshop\/","title":{"rendered":"Newman @ Nice locality workshop"},"content":{"rendered":"

Our colleague\u00a0Elise Newman<\/a> <\/strong>was an invited speaker at a workshop about\u00a0Locality across the board<\/a> <\/strong>in the pun-inviting locality of Nice<\/a>. \u00a0Her talk was entitled “The locality of subcategorization: a case for underspecified category”, and here is the abstract<\/a> for it:<\/p>\n

This talk is concerned with the selectional mechanism that underlies verb-argument pairs like (1).<\/em><\/p>\n

    \n
  1. \n
      \n
    1. a. depend [PP on …]<\/em>
      \nb. say [CP that …]<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      Following Pesetsky (1982), I\u0092ll refer to the relationship between the verb and its arguments in (1) as l-selection, where the verb requires a particular lexical item to head its argument. This distinguishes the relationship in (1) from other kinds of selection based on syntactic (c-selection) or semantic (s-selection) properties.<\/em><\/p>\n

      Such a distinction among selectional rules echoes earlier work, such as Chomsky (1965), which claimed that relationships like (1) were governed by strict subcategorization rules, in contrast with selection of a subject, for example, which was governed by selectional rules. Some differences between the two kinds of rules pertained to their locality conditions and the kinds of properties they were sensitive to: 1) strict subcategorization was limited to head-complement pairs, while selectional rules could create other kinds of branching structures, and 2) strict subcategorization rules only applied when there was no more general syntactic property to appeal to.<\/em><\/p>\n

      Puzzle: the modern view of selection (which only makes use of selectional rules) does not capture the original locality distinction between subcategorization and selection: l-selectional relationships like (1) seem to only arise in head-complement pairs. In other words, we do not find cases where a head l-selects for the head of its specifier.<\/em><\/p>\n

      This is a puzzle in current frameworks. Since Merge underlies both complementation and specifier-formation, it is not obvious what syntactic tools we have for enforcing only complementation in these cases.<\/em><\/p>\n

      I offer a proposal that captures the locality profile of strict subcategorization within a current feature-driven framework. Building on Newman (2024), the proposal makes use of an underspecified categorial feature X, which can be checked by any kind of element. The interaction between X-checking and the checking of other c- selectional features imposes restrictions on the order of operations: elements that are not c-selected can only check X, and therefore must merge first, or they will be bled by Merge of another element (which can check X in addition to whatever feature selected it). The requirement to merge first is what restricts l-selected elements to being complements.<\/em><\/p>\n

      While this may seem like just a solution to a technicality, the account makes predictions for the locality of A-movement as well, when we consider how l-selection interacts with the functional hierarchy more generally. I will argue that the functional hierarchy stems from a mixture of l-selectional and c-selectional requirements, where the interaction between the two can produce smuggling configurations (Collins 2005). When smuggling happens, arguments can obviate certain locality conditions on A- movement to derive phenomena such as symmetric passivization.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      Our colleague\u00a0Elise Newman was an invited speaker at a workshop about\u00a0Locality across the board in the pun-inviting locality of Nice. \u00a0Her talk was entitled “The locality of subcategorization: a case for underspecified category”, and here is the abstract for it: This talk is concerned with the selectional mechanism that underlies verb-argument pairs like (1). a. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16884","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-faculty-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16884","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16884"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16884\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16898,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16884\/revisions\/16898"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16884"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16884"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16884"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}