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<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">Dear Pling-members, <br /><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">I would like to remind you that <a href="https://sites.google.com/view/shannonbryant/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Dr. Shannon Bryant</a> (Rutgers University) will give an online talk next week </span><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">titled "Who, What, and Where: Event roles and pronoun choice in locative prepositional phrases", as part of the FWF project <em>Implicational hierarchies in clausal complementation</em> (PI Susi Wurmbrand).<br /><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">The talk will take place on Tuesday, 16 May at 17:00h. You can find the abstract and the link for the meeting below.<br /><br /></span>I hope to see many of you there!<br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">Best,<br />Iva Kovač<br /><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">***<br /><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;"></span><em><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">Who, What, and Where: Event roles and pronoun choice in locative prepositional phrases<br /><br /></span></em><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">Zoom link: <a href="https://univienna.zoom.us/j/69642965798?pwd=eE5mZFl1aC9wemVnSlBKS1A3eFN1QT09">https://univienna.zoom.us/j/69642965798?pwd=eE5mZFl1aC9wemVnSlBKS1A3eFN1QT09</a> <br /><br />Abstract:<br /><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">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. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;"></span><span style="font-family: verdana, geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">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. </span></p>
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