[PLing] TLC Talk by Shannon Bryant on June 23

[Iva Kovač]

Dear PLing-members,

We would like to invite you to the final talk within the Theoretical 
Linguistics Colloquium in this semester.

Speaker: Shannon Bryant (Rutgers)

Date & time: Tuesday, 23 June, 16h
Location: Sensengasse 3a, 1090 Vienna, Seminarraum 2

The title and the abstract can be found below.

We are looking forward to seeing many of you there!

Valerie Wurm & Iva Kovač
The TLC organizers
https://sites.google.com/view/totlvienna/upcoming

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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).

(1) Michele_i set a glass next to her_i / herself_i.

(2a) Michele_i persuaded her mother [PRO_i to be allowed to stay up 
late].
(2b) Michele_i persuaded Bob_k [PRO_k,*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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