Dennis Ott (Harvard) will be giving a Syntax Brown bag on Friday, Oct 30th at 1:30pm in the 1st floor conference room (10 Washington Place).
Title:
Remnant Movement in German Revisited
Abstract:
In this talk, I argue that for most (if not all) of the classic cases from German, analyses in terms of remnant movement are unfounded. I show that analyses in terms of V-topicalization and Distributed Deletion fare better empirically and conceptually. In addition, remnant movement poses conceptual problems for Merge-based grammars on a more general level. Taken together, this leads to the conclusion that the inexistence of remnant movement -- in German and perhaps beyond --, rather than its existence, ought to be the null hypothesis.