缅北强奸

Dr. Chris Barker (NYU) will give a talk entitled: "Deriving some reconstruction effects in a directly compositional semantics".

Reconstruction effects in relative clauses, including licensing of idioms ("the headway that we made"), of reflexives ("the picture of himself John liked best"), and of bound pronouns ("the relative of hers that every woman loves") provide well-known arguments in favor of a head-movement account for relative clauses (e.g., Vergnaud 1974,Kayne 1994, etc.).

Jacobson 1998, 2003 argues that given a well-regulated syntax/semantics---in particular, one that obeys direct compositionality---at least some reconstruction effects fall out without positing syntactic movement. Building on her insights, I develop a variable-free, directly compositional system that addresses wh-fronting, relative clause formation, reflexives, and quantificational binding, with special attention to weak crossover. Reconstruction effects are especially interesting for understanding weak crossover, since reconstruction examples provide systematic cases in which a quantificational expression follows a pronoun that it binds ("the relative of his that everyone loves the most"). This shows that weak crossover can't be a merely linear constraint.

For technical background, the analysis will be expressed in a continuation-based grammar in the style of Barker and Shan 2010, available for free here:

Some additional details of my approach to reconstruction can be found here: