LingLunch : Alex Grosu

Jeudi 27 Avril 2017, 12:00 to 13:00
Organisation: 
Pascal Amsili (LLF)
Lieu: 

ODG – Salle du conseil (533)

Alex Grosu (Tel Aviv University)
Japanese internally headed relatives and three potentially homophonous constructions; how to tell them apart

This presentation relies on the results in Grosu & Hoshi (Glossa, 2016), and assumes the formal analysis of Japanese Internally Headed Relative Constructions (IHRCs) in Grosu & Landman (JEAL, 2012), with the conceptual and technical refinements to the latter in Landman (Glossa, 2016). IHRCs in Japanese are potentially homophonous with adverbial clauses, complement clauses, and gapless externally light-headed relative clauses, a state of affairs that has given rise to a variety of questionable claims in earlier literature. In particular: [A] The very reality of IHRCs has been denied, and it has been claimed they are all adverbial clauses, or [B] their relative status has been denied, proposing to view them as discourses consisting of two sentences related by an E-type anaphoric relation, or [C] it has been denied that they possess the following properties: [i] island-sensitivity (to the CNPC and the Adverbial island Constraint), [ii] construal only as definite descriptions, [iii] impossibility of definite referential internal heads, and [iv] existence of a 'change' sub-variety that is not reducible to gapless externally light-headed relatives.

The talk will provide tests for establishing the separate existence of all four constructions, and will argue against earlier challenges to the reality of the properties in [B] and [Ci-iv].