LING819
Seminar in Syntactic Theory

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Week by week readings
Jan. 24  Ross (1969) "Guess Who"
Jan. 31- Feb. 21  (Feb. 14 was a snow day)
           Grimshaw (1979) "Complement Selection and the Lexicon"
           Grinder and Postal (1971) "Missing Antecedents"
           Wasow (1972) Anaphoric Relations in English MIT diss. Ch.3
           Lasnik (2007) "On Ellipsis: The PF Approach to Missing Constituents"
Feb. 28-March 7  Island violation repair
March 14   Island violation non-repair?
March 28   P-stranding. Swiping.
April 4      More on identity (especially about Warner's observation); more on Swiping [Here's Jeremy Hartman's honors thesis with important new discussion of Swiping]
April 11  More discussion of alternative treatments of Warner's observation. [Here's Goldberg's thesis on VP ellpsis with V stranding.] Discussion of Swiping; {Here's the Du Plessis squib on P-stranding in intermediate Comp.}
April 18  More on successive cyclicity in Sluicing. Aguero-Bautista's paper on this is in the course box. Flash! Now available in e-form (pre-final, so please do not circulate).  [The argument is based on WH-Q interactions.]
April 25  More on the bound pronoun exemption to clause-mate requirements. More on successive cyclicity in Sluicing. Multiple Sluicing in English (HO (corrected version) and ms.).
May 2   More on Sluicing and successive cyclicity
May 9   Multiple Sluicing.  Traces, identity and ellipsis. HO: Repair of EPP violations?  Lasnik&Park LI paper

Lecture:

Wednesday 2:00-5:00
1108B MMH

Howard Lasnik, instructor

1106 Marie Mount Hall
<lasnik [AT] UMD [DOT] edu>
(301) 405-4929

Office hours:
Monday afternoons & evenings
Thursday all day (until 5:00)

Course description

Issues in Ellipsis

Subject matter:
-The nature of ellipsis: PF deletion or LF copying or WYSIWYG?
-The proper formulation of the 'identity' requirement: semantic, formal, some combination?
-Repair by ellipsis: What kinds of violations can/can't be repaired by ellipsis? And implications for the architecture of the grammar.
We will look at some of the older literature on these questions (e.g., Ross on Sluicing, Sag's thesis, May's book) and, of course, more recent stuff, by Merchant, by me, and by others.
More info to follow.

Course requirements

-Three installments of class notes: a joint enterprise with all students deciding how to divide up the work.
NEW: The final version of the student class notes project can be found here.
-A proposal for a paper on a topic in ellipsis, summarizing the problem, presenting key data, and giving relevant bibliography.