Caroline Heycock seminar

Professor Caroline Heycock (University of Edinburgh) will teach a short course entitled 'Questions of/and Identity' at the University of Ghent, from Wednesday March 23rd until Friday March 25th 2011. The course will deal with the following 3 topics: (1) The strangeness of specificational sentences (2) Predication and movement (3) Questions and answers. A more detailed description of the course can be found below.

The schedule for the course is the following:

Wednesday 23rd March:      2pm-5pm

Thursday 24th March:          2pm-5pm

Friday 24th March:               9.30am-12.30pm

All classes will take place in the 'grote vergaderzaal' in the Blandijn building (Blandijnberg 2). For information on how to get to Blandijn, click here.

Participation if free, but if you are planning to attend the course, please register by sending an email to rachel.nyeATugent.be.

 

Questions of/and identity

The strangeness of specificational sentences

Ever since Higgins’ work from the early 70s, the syntax and semantics of the type of copular sentence in (1) have proved a challenge for linguists, despite its apparent simplicity:

1.         The real loser is democracy.

These simple specificational sentences have much in common with the specificational pseudoclefts, illustrated in (2):

2.         What they are demanding is a change of government.

In this class I will set out the peculiar properties of these types of copular clause, focusing on their characteristics in terms of information structure, connectivity, and agreement, and attempt to demonstrate how they continue to pose problems for our understanding of the syntax/semantics interface.

Predication and movement

In this class I will explore the claims that some of the puzzles that we have considered (and perhaps even more) can be solved by invoking the possibility of leftward movement of a predicative noun phrase, reviewing in  particular proposals by Birner, Moro, den Dikken, and Mikkelsen. We will tease apart what turn out to be significant syntactic (and semantic) differences within triples such as the following:

3.     a.       The chameleon is an amazing animal. The lizard in this next video is also an amazing animal. /Also an amazing animal is the lizard in this next video.

        b.       The chameleon is an amazing animal. But the lizard in this next video is the most amazing animal I know. / But the most amazing animal I know is the lizard in this next video .

        c.       The chameleon is an amazing colour. But the lizard in this next video is the oddest colour I have ever seen. / *But the oddest colour I have ever seen is the lizard in this next video.

Questions and answers

Early attempts to treat cases like (2) as question/answer pairs faced problems in providing a coherent semantics. However, more recent work by Romero has shown that it is possible to provide a plausible semantics, and it has been argued by Romero, Shlenker, den Dikken that such an account provides a ready explanation for the connectivity effects that such examples display. It has further been suggested that the same approach can extend to simple specificational sentences such as those in (1), given the existence of concealed questions:

4.             They announced the loser before they announced the winner.

In this class we will explore the connection between questions and specificational subjects, and examine whether a phonological deletion approach will finally allow us to solve the mysteries of the connectivity effects that have been identified in these cases.