Kolloquien | Linguistik

FB Kolloquium: PRO as a radically underspecified pronoun: Evidence from German, Icelandic, and Russian

Wann
Donnerstag, 13. Juni 2019
15:15 bis 16:45 Uhr

Wo
G 307

Veranstaltet von
FB Linguistik

Vortragende Person/Vortragende Personen:
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).