Tom Roeper (UMass) will present a Brown Bag on Oct 23 at 1:30pm in 10 WP, room 103.
"Vacate Phase and Presupposition Guarantee"
The central argument is that Phase-based interpretation of Subject auxiliary inversion, inversion in subordinate clauses, and well-known non-inversion in acquisition ("why I can't play ball") all receive a natural explanation if presuppositions are fixed prior to movement. The presupposition contrast between
a. Why didn’t you go outside and
b. How come you didn’t go outside
(Collins (1991), Fitzpatrick (2005)
provides the clue to the acquisition path in English and to similar dialect stability in a wide variety of dialects including African American English, South African Black English, Irish, and Singaporean all of which show dialect stability. The geographic diversity of stable dialects suggests that a deep form of grammatical stability is involved.
The analysis is then extended to V2 in Germanic and the domains where V2 occurs in subordinate clauses and presuppositions are not maintained. A more articulated theory of traces and illocutionary force are both engaged to capture all of the facts, including the surprising unembedded complementizer forms, exclamatory and non-exclamatory, like:
dass er Fussball spielt [that he plays baseball]
which are completely unknown in English [*that I can sing].