[PLing] Reminder: Talk by Dr. Shannon Bryant, 16 May, 17h

[Iva Kovač]

Dear Pling-members,

I would like to remind you that Dr. Shannon Bryant [1] (Rutgers 
University) will give an online talk next week titled "Who, What, and 
Where: Event roles and pronoun choice in locative prepositional 
phrases", as part of the FWF project _Implicational hierarchies in 
clausal complementation_ (PI Susi Wurmbrand).

The talk will take place on Tuesday, 16 May at 17:00h. You can find the 
abstract and the link for the meeting below.

I hope to see many of you there!

Best,
Iva Kovač

***

Who, What, and Where: Event roles and pronoun choice in locative 
prepositional phrases

Zoom link: 
https://univienna.zoom.us/j/69642965798?pwd=eE5mZFl1aC9wemVnSlBKS1A3eFN1QT09

Abstract:

In English, both reflexives and personal pronouns can be used in 
locative prepositional phrases (LPPs) to express coreference with the 
sentence subject, as in "Michele set a glass next to her(self)." Such 
constructions have proven a persistent puzzle for formal binding 
theories, and there remains no clear consensus on whether/to what extent 
syntactic principles play a part in shaping preferences between forms.

In this talk, I will advocate for the view that pronoun choice in 
English LPPs is determined not by the syntax of the sentences containing 
them, but by the structure of the events those sentences describe. I 
will begin by presenting experimental work that clarifies the dependency 
of preferences on two factors: the kind of event conveyed by the verb, 
and the kind of relation conveyed by the preposition. I will then argue 
that the influence of these factors cannot be straightforwardly reduced 
to syntactic differences across sentence types -- and, hence, to 
syntactic binding principles. Instead, I suggest that they reveal a 
crucial sensitivity to the event roles ascribed to the referent of the 
sentence subject/LPP complement, with the reflexive surfacing whenever 
the referent fills more than one role (cf. Jackendoff 1972, Kuno 1987, 
Wilkins 1988). This outcome helps delimit the role of syntactic binding 
principles in determining the distribution of English pronominals, 
allowing us to restrict the space of plausible theories, and provides a 
window into the relationship between event structure and linguistic 
expression.



Links:
------
[1] https://sites.google.com/view/shannonbryant/
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