Speaker: Claire Halpert (University of Minnesota)
When: Thursday January 21st, 3:30pm
Where: MAASS 217 (801 Sherbrooke Ouest)
Title: It takes a village to raise a subject
Abstract:
In this talk, I analyze cross-linguistic variation that arises in raising-to-subject constructions. Many current theories of raising-to-subject are built around the English pattern shown below, where (1) and (2) are grammatical but (3) is not:
(1) It seems that Sipho made bread.
(2) Sipho seems to have made bread.
(3) *Sipho seems that made bread.Certain varieties of Zulu, by contrast, show nearly the opposite pattern, a situation that is incompatible with current theoretical accounts. I propose a unified account for the derivation of hyper-raising and standard raising. I argue that the presence or absence of these constructions in a given language can be determined by independent properties of CP and TP in the language, including: 1) whether CPs or infinitival phrases are phi-goals in the language and 2) the presence of an EPP effect on T and (and how it can be satisfied), and 3) how embedded clauses combine with matrix predicates. I show that variation in these factors can capture the different raising profiles found in Zulu, Makhuwa, and English, and Uyghur and gives us a new tool to investigate differences in this domain more generally.