160134 SE Seminar in this subject area (2015S)

Part 1 of this course investigates the features and domains of variable binding, in particular in light of the data and Agree proposal in Kratzer (2009). We will develop an alternative Cecchetto-style split spell-out model involving direct binding of pronominal variables by their antecedent noun phrases.
Part 2 focuses on the domain and locality restrictions of quantifier raising. The central hypothesis we will pursue is that there are no special clause-boundedness restrictions on quantifier raising, such as Scope Economy. Rather, the difficulties and inconsistencies reported for covert movement across different types of finite and non-finite clauses directly reflect structural complexity defined by independently motivated syntactic clause-structure domains. We will hypothesize that clause-boundedness effects observed for quantifier raising are only apparent, and that the difficulty associated with constructing non-clause-bound inverse scope interpretations is attributed to increased processing costs calculated based on the complexity of the structure, specifically the number of intermediate uninterpreted copies as required in a cyclic movement approach.