[PLing] TLC season finale - Shannon Bryant - 17 June

[Iva Kovač]

Dear everyone,

We would like to invite you to the final talk of the season within the 
Theoretical Linguistics Colloquium.

Speaker: Shannon Bryant (Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science)

Date/venue: 27 June, 16-17:30, Sensengasse 3a, 1090 Vienna, Seminarraum 
3
Title: Thematic roles in binding and control

Further information can be found on our website:
https://sites.google.com/view/totlvienna/upcoming

We are looking forward to seeing many of you there!

Valerie Wurm, Magdalena Lohninger, and Iva Kovač
The TLC organizers

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Title & abstract:

Thematic roles in binding and control

Binding and control have long been at the heart of syntactic theory. 
However, it has long been known that simple syntactic approaches fall 
short of capturing the full range of relevant phenomena. This talk will 
consider two problem cases found in English. The first is binding within 
locative prepositional phrases, as in (1), where both a reflexive and 
personal pronoun can covary with the sentence subject. The second is 
so-called control shift, illustrated in (2a), where the implicit subject 
of passive complement clause takes a different controller than the one 
that is usually required (cf. 2b).

  	* Michelei set a glass next to heri / herselfi.

	* a. Michelei persuaded her mother [PROi to be allowed to stay up 
late].
b. Michelei persuaded Bobk [PROk,*i to stay up late].

I will make the case that, far from falling at the fringes of linguistic 
theory, these phenomena are central to understanding the nature of 
binding and control. Based on experimental evidence, I argue that both 
PP-internal binding and control shift favor theories that appeal to 
thematic roles. More specifically, I suggest that English pronoun choice 
depends on the identification of distinct thematic roles within a single 
event description, while control relations depend on the matching of 
thematic roles in matrix and embedded event descriptions. Insofar as 
thematic roles are part of the interface between syntax and semantics, 
binding and control must be understood at this interface, too.
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