[PLing] Talk by Itai Bassi on May 19, 11:00 CEST

[Madeleine Butschety]

Dear colleagues, 

we cordially invite you to a talk by Itai Bassi (ZAS Berlin & Ben Gurion University) as part of the Jezik & Linguistics Colloquia series. His talk titled " Copied Relative Clauses and the Theory of Fake Indexicals " (abstract: see below) will take place next week on Monday, May 19 , at 11:00 CEST at lecture room P7 at the University of Nova Gorica (Kompas building), and online. 

To join via Zoom, please use the following link (no registration required): 
[ https://ungsi.zoom.us/j/96811924930?pwd=l1yj0ekICmWoUkk7ZjDmKAy0bNO0ah.1 | https://ungsi.zoom.us/j/96811924930?pwd=l1yj0ekICmWoUkk7ZjDmKAy0bNO0ah.1 ] 

We hope to see many of you there! 

Best, 
Madeleine Butschety, on behalf of the Center for Cognitive Science of Language 

>>ABSTRACT: Itai Bassi 
" Copied Relative Clauses and the Theory of Fake Indexicals " 



Sentences like (1), in which the first-person pronoun “my” has a bound-variable interpretation (a 'Fake Indexical’ pronoun), have drawn the attention of semanticists and syntacticians due to their potentially dramatic implications for the architecture of grammar. In particular, many theories of Fake Indexicality imply that the dependency between a binder and a pronoun it binds is not a purely semantic (LF) dependency but it also feeds non-trivial PF processes that determine the morphological shape of the pronoun. 

(1) I am the only one who can take care of my children (Kratzer 2009) 
Bound-variable reading: 'Everyone else cannot take care of their children’ 

Yet, many issues remain about the exact mechanism at play that makes Fake Indexicality possible. In this talk, I aim to clarify some of these outstanding issues. I do so by studying a novel and related construction where the relative clause (RC) that hosts the bound indexical modifies a partitive structure: 

(2) I was one of the few writers who actually wrote what I really saw. (Web example, among many) 
Bound-variable reading: 'Very few writers actually wrote what they saw’ 

I will show that a number of puzzles disappear once we acknowledge that the RC in these structures is displaced (extraposed) and occupies a higher position than seems on the surface. Specifically, the RC is realized in a position that is directly or indirectly predicated over the matrix subject. I will show that my proposal allows us to account for a seemingly unrelated puzzle of number-agreement mismatch in relative clauses: 

(3) Paul is one the few philosophers who understands Chomsky. (Longenbaugh 2019) 



The proposal moreover makes a number of subtle but correct predictions for RC stacking, for an interaction between Fake Indexicality and NPI licensing, and for constraints on co-occurrences of elements bearing ‘fake’ features. Time permitting, I will address the account's potential for explaining some of the cross-linguistic variation in Fake Indexical licensing. 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.univie.ac.at/pipermail/pling/attachments/20250515/8d3bf78e/attachment.html>