Roberto Zamparelli (Trento) will be giving a syntax brown bag on Feb 20 at 1:30 in room 703 of the linguistics department (726 Broadway, 7th floor)
TITLE:
Coordination, Non-nominal Subjects and Semantic Agreement
ABSTRACT
The conjunction of singular nominal subjects normally triggers plural
agreement in verbal or adjectival predicates ("Karl and Marc are
tall/have arrived"). This is however not the case with sentential
subjects ("[that Mary is here] and [that John is away] is
strange/puzzles me"), and other types of (mostly, non-nominal)
subjects. The aims of the talk are to evaluate various possible
strategies to obtain this effect, in particular: (i) The possibility
that CPs are endowed with a special feature that triggers "default"
singular agreement; (ii) the idea that CPs subjects do not have any
phi-feature (Number, Gender, Person), again resulting (with some
technical complications) in a "default agreement" strategy; (iii) the
possibility that agreement is also determined by semantic factors, in
particular, by whether the subject denotation can be type-shifted to a
singular individual, and by the point at which this type-shifting must
occur.
AFFILIATION
Roberto Zamparelli
University of Trento
Centro Interdipartimentale Mente e Cervello (CiMEC)
Dipartimento di Scienze della Cognizione e della Formazione (DISCOF)