Department Colloquium: PRO as a radically underspecified pronoun: Evidence from German, Icelandic, and Russian
Time
Thursday, 13. June 2019
15:15 - 16:45
Location
G 307
Organizer
FB Linguistik
Speaker:
Roland Hinterhölzl (Università Ca' Foscari, Venezia)
I will present data from German, Russian and Icelandic that speak against the movement theory of control (MTC) promoted by Hornstein (2002) and speaks in favour of Landau’s (2002, 2008) agreement based account (ATC). In particular, I will argue that PRO constitutes a radically underspecified element in an account in which lexical features of pronouns are taken to indicate presuppositions and show that its interpretation is decisively determined by a complex interplay of binding and control (where control is interpreted as an Agree relation in terms of semantic features alone).