Amy Rose Deal (UC, Santa Cruz) will give a talk entitled “Cyclicity and connectivity in Nez Perce relative clauses,” in Rajesh Bhatt’s seminar tomorrow, Monday, March 24. Her talk is in the Partee room at 4:00.
The abstract:
This talk centers on two aspects of movement in relative clauses, focusing on evidence from Nez Perce.
First, I argue that relativization involves _cyclic_ A’ movement, even in monoclausal relatives. Rather than moving directly to Spec,CP, the relative element moves there via an intermediate position in an A’ outer specifier of the TP immediately subjacent to relative C. Cyclicity of this type suggests that the TP sister of relative C constitutes a phase – a result whose implications extend to an ill-understood corner of the English that-trace effect.
Second, I argue that Nez Perce relativization provides new evidence for an ambiguity thesis for relative clauses, according to which some but not all relatives are derived by a head-raising analysis. The argument comes from connectivity and anticonnectivity in morphological case. These new data complement the range of standard arguments for head-raising, which draw primarily on connectivity effects at the syntax-semantics interface.
(You can get a preview of her talk here.)
