Dr. Sandra Chung (UC Santa Cruz) will give a colloquium in the seminar room of Totem Field Studios.
Abstract: Far more is kn own about the crosslinguistic profiles of control and raising than about tough movement (henceforth TM)\, the construction famously exemplified by John is easy to please (Chomsky 1964). One reason for this: the analysis of English TM has been controversial since the mid-1970’s\, and re mains controversial today. In this talk\, I first sketch a novel approach t o English TM that closely parallels the head-raising analysis of relative c lauses developed by Bianchi 1999\, Bhatt 2002\, Sichel 2014\, and others. T he idea is that TM involves NP raising – an NP raises from an embedd ed clause to merge with a D that satisfies the referential / quantification al requirements of the higher adjective. I show that the NP raising account does a remarkably good job of handling the empirical intricacies of Englis h TM\, including the TM subject’s thematic connectedness to the embedded cl ause\, its ability to reconstruct for variable binding\, and its inability to reconstruct for scope. I then turn to Chamorro\, an Austronesian languag e of the Mariana Islands. Chamorro has a complex sentence type formed from higher adjectives comparable to the adjectives found in English TM\; e.g. < i>mapput ‘hard’\, libiånu ‘easy’\, and so on. The Chamorro const ruction is superficially quite different from English TM. Nonetheless\, I s how that it involves movement\, and this movement is best analyzed as NP ra ising. In broader perspective\, this investigation contributes to the goal of decomposing complex sentence types into smaller\, more elemental parts.< /p> URL;VALUE=URI:https://linguistics.ubc.ca/events/event/sandra-chung-uc-santa -cruz-colloquium/ END:VEVENT BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:America/Vancouver BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:-0800 TZOFFSETTO:-0700 DTSTART:20220313T100000 TZNAME:PDT END:DAYLIGHT END:VTIMEZONE END:VCALENDAR