Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dk4vv Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-24T13:54:41.101Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Locative Inversion, PP Topicalization, and Weak Crossover in English

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 November 2021

BENJAMIN BRUENING
BENJAMIN BRUENING*
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics and Cognitive Science University of Delaware, [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The literature on locative inversion in English currently disputes whether locative inversion differs from PP topicalization in permitting a quantifier in the fronted PP to bind a pronoun in the subject. In order to resolve this dispute, this paper runs two experiments on Amazon Mechanical Turk, one an acceptability judgment task and the other a forced-choice task. Both find that PP topicalization does not differ from locative inversion: both permit variable binding. Locative inversion also does not differ from a minimally different sentence with the overt expletive there. These findings remove an argument against the null expletive analysis of English locative inversion, and they also show that weak crossover is not uniformly triggered by A-bar movement.

Keywords

locative inversiontopicalizationweak crossovervariable binding
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 58 , Issue 4 , November 2022 , pp. 739 - 757
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

Thanks to Amanda Payne, for running the experiments on Mechanical Turk, and to the Journal of Linguistics reviewers, for helpful comments.

References

REFERENCES

Adger, David, Drummond, Alex, Hall, David & van Urk, Coppe. 2016. Is there Condition C reconstruction? Poster presented at NELS 47, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.Google Scholar
Bresnan, Joan. 1994. Locative inversion and the architecture of universal grammar. Language 70, 72–131.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bruening, Benjamin. 2010. Language-particular syntactic rules and constraints: English locative inversion and Do-support. Language 86, 43–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bruening, Benjamin. 2014. Word formation is syntactic: Adjectival passives in English. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 32, 363–422.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bruening, Benjamin. 2016. Alignment in syntax: Quotative inversion in English. Syntax 19, 111–155.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bruening, Benjamin. 2018. Word formation is syntactic: Raising in nominalizations. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics 3, art. 102. doi:10.5334/gjgl.470.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bruening, Benjamin & Al Khalaf, Eman. 2019. No argument-adjunct asymmetry in reconstruction for binding condition C. Journal of Linguistics 55, 247–276. doi:10.1017/S0022226718000324.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clifton, Charles, Fanselow, Gisbert & Frazier, Lyn. 2006. Amnestying superiority violations: Processing multiple questions. Linguistic Inquiry 37, 51–68.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Culicover, Peter W. & Levine, Robert D.. 2001. Stylistic inversion in English: A reconsideration. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 19, 283–310.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Diercks, Michael. 2017. Locative inversion. In Everaert, Martin & van Riemsdijk, Henk (eds.), The Wiley Blackwell companion to syntax, 2nd edn., vol. IV, 2201–2230. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. doi:10.1002/9781118358733.wbsyncom082.Google Scholar
Doggett, Teal Bissell. 2004. All things being unequal: Locality in movement. Dissertation, MIT.Google Scholar
Eilam, Aviad. 2011. Explorations in the informational component. Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.Google Scholar
Gibson, Edward, Piantadosi, Steve & Fedorenko, Kristina. 2011. Using Mechanical Turk to obtain and analyze English acceptability judgments. Language and Linguistics Compass 5, 509–524.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gordon, Peter C. & Hendrick, Randall. 1997. Intuitive knowledge of linguistic co-reference. Cognition 62, 325–370.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kush, Dave, Lidz, Jeffrey & Phillips, Colin. 2017. Looking forwards and backwards: The real-time processing of strong and weak crossover. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics 2, art. 70. doi:10.5334/gjgl.280.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Landau, Idan. 2010. The locative syntax of experiencers. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Lawler, John M. 1977. A agrees with B in Achenese: A problem for Relational Grammar. In Cole, Peter & Sadock, Jerrold M. (eds.), Grammatical relations, vol. 8, Syntax and Semantics, 219–248. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Pica, Pierre & Snyder, William. 1995. Weak crossover, scope, and agreement in a Minimalist framework. In Aranovich, Raul, Byrne, William, Preuss, Susanne & Senturia, Martha (eds.), Proceedings of the Thirteenth West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, 334–349. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Postal, Paul M. 1977. About a ‘nonargument’ for raising. Linguistic Inquiry 8, 141–154.Google Scholar
Postal, Paul M. 1993. Remarks on weak crossover effects. Linguistic Inquiry 24, 539–556.Google Scholar
Postal, Paul M. 2004. A paradox in English syntax. In Skeptical linguistic essays, 15–82. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
R Core Team. 2012. R: A language and environment for statistical computing. Vienna: R Foundation for Statistical Computing.Google Scholar
Reinhart, Tanya. 1976. The syntactic domain of anaphora. Dissertation, MIT.Google Scholar
Safir, Ken. 2017. Weak crossover. In Everaert, Martin & van Riemsdijk, Henk (eds.), The Wiley Blackwell companion to syntax, 2nd edn., vol. VIII, 4939–4978. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. doi:10.1002/9781118358733.wbsyncom090.Google Scholar
Sprouse, Jon. 2011. A validation of Amazon Mechanical Turk for the collection of acceptability judgments in linguistic theory. Behavior Research Methods 43, 155–167.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Wierzba, Marta, Salzmann, Martin & Georgi, Doreen. To appear. An experimental investigation of reconstruction for Condition C in German A-bar movement. In Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.Google Scholar