Dr. Keir Moulton
Fri, Feb 28
|University of Calgary | CHE 212
Keir is Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Toronto. His work focuses on issues at the syntax-semantics interface, particularly clausal embedding and anaphora. He incorporates experimental methods in this work, alongside an interest in sentence processing.
Time & Location
Feb 28, 2025, 3:30 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.
University of Calgary | CHE 212, 2500 University Dr NW, Calgary, AB T2N 1N4, Canada
About the event
In clausal prolepsis constructions, a clause is doubled by a pronoun or demonstrative (1).
1. a. I love it that there’s cookies after the colloq.
b. That’s great that you are coming to semantics reading group.
Once correctly separated from expletive constructions (Ruys 2010), prolepsis constructions pose a puzzle because one argument slot is expressed twice. In joint work with Wesley Orth (UofT), we revive a Rosenbaum-style account in which prolepsis constructions are generated as DP constituents (Sudhoff 1996, Angelopoulos 2023), where the determiner it selects CP. We will present new experimental evidence that clarifies the island status of clausal prolepsis (Kiparsky and Kiparsky 1970, Postal and Pullum 1988). Prolepsis constructions are more opaque for wh-movement than ‘bare’ CPs, but less opaque than complex NPs. We argue that this follows on our account and not on competitor accounts (Angelopoulos 2023, Longenbaugh 2019). Further evidence for the analysis comes from close examination of cases like (1b) where the proleptic element is a demonstrative. I will end with a discussion of why (certain) CPs participate in prolepsis, focusing on debates about the nominal nature of C across languages.