We are pleased to announce that the next talk in our 2013-14 McGill Linguistics Colloquium Series will be by Norvin Richards (MIT) on Friday, February 28th at 3:30 pm in the Education Building room 433.
The title of the talk is “Pied-piping and Selectional Contiguity”.
Cable (2007, 2010) argues, on the basis of data from Tlingit, that wh-questions involve three participants: an interrogative C, a wh-word, and a head Q, which is visible in Tlingit but invisible in English. In Cable’s account, QP standardly dominates the wh-word, and wh-movement is always of QP. The question of how much material pied-pipes under wh-movement, on Cable’s account, is essentially a question about the distribution of QP. Cable offers several conditions and parameters governing the distribution of QP. I will try to derive Cable’s conditions on the distribution of QP from Contiguity Theory, a series of proposals about the interaction of syntax with phonology that I have been developing in recent work.