Syntax Brown Bag: Mark Baltin and Jeroen van Craenenbroeck
Mark Baltin and Jeroen van Craenenbroeck
"On Becoming A Pronoun"
Friday, November 7 at 1:30pm
726 Boadway, 7th-Floor Conference Room
Abstract:
Many processes in grammar look as though they require reference to a feature
[+pronoun], in that expressions of other types appear to change to pronouns. We
argue that appeal to such a feature is the wrong way to look at this phenomenon,
and that a more fruitful way to approach this phenomenon is to adopt Postal's
(1966) analysis of pronouns as determiners with deleted complements. In this way,
we can account for why elements appear to change to pronouns, but not , say,
anaphors; the feature‐changing approach, by contrast, makes both types of change
equally possible, and does not, as a consequence, account for why the former type
of change occurs, but not the latter. We show that our account does not violate
Chomsky's (1995) Inclusiveness Constraint, which limits the appearance of
elements in syntactic computations to those that are present from the outset of the
computation; the feature‐changing approach does violate Inclusiveness. We also
show that this approach to pronouns accounts for vehicle change in ellipsis
contrasts, the pronominal character of various kinds of empty elements, such as
ellipsis sites and traces, and the existence of copy‐raising (Moore (1998), in which
an element raises and a pronoun occurs at the raised element's point of origin.