Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique
Ce séminaire reçoit des conférenciers invités spécialisés dans différents domaines de la linguistique. Les membres du Département, les étudiants et les personnes externes intéressées sont tous cordialement invités. Description du séminaire ![Imprimer Print](design/print.png)
Titre | Wh-movement, locality, and optionality in Eastern Cham |
Conférencier | Kenneth Baclawski (University of California, Berkeley) |
Date | mardi 11 décembre 2018 |
Heure | 12h15 |
Salle | L208 (Bâtiment Candolle) |
Description | Eastern Cham (Austronesian: Vietnam) is a wh-in situ language, but wh-phrases can in some cases be moved to the left periphery, resulting in apparently optional wh-movement. Furthermore, multiple wh-phrases can be moved to the left periphery, in which case they exhibit Anti-Superiority effects. This talk demonstrates that apparent wh-movement is featurally identical to topicalization and orthogonal to the interpretation of wh-phrases, which is accomplished by covert feature movement. The Anti-Superiority effects are explained by iteration of the relevant left peripheral phrase. Both apparent wh-movement and topicalization are then shown not to be best explained in terms of traditional information structural concepts like aboutness topic and D-linking. Instead, the movement operations are licensed by discourse connectedness (DC): a property of certain discourse anaphora where the antecedent's sentence and the anaphor's sentence are related via discourse subordination, a type of discourse or rhetorical relation best exemplified by elaboration and explanation. Putting this together, apparent wh-movement and topicalization are both instances of DC-movement. This movement reflects a property of certain discourse anaphora, not an information structural category. Finally, the optionality of DC-movement is characterized in terms of competition between different forms of anaphora: regular (in situ) anaphora and DC (moved) anaphora. Optionality arises from competing economy and interpretive constraints. |
Document(s) joint(s) |
- |