Relativism and Universalism in Linguistics - Fachbereich 10 ...

Workshop 5 – Gro 175
island violating questions and relative clauses in English, Greek and German and present novel
data from Italian and Hebrew, where the main finding is that resumption fails to “save” island
violations in questions. I will present the basics of a processing account for these results.
In the second part of the talk I will focus on the relation between true and intrusive
resumption. Based on evidence from resumption in Greek oblique relative clauses, a case
which seems to lie between “true” and “intrusive” resumption, I will argue that while the
distinction between the two types of resumption is indispensable, “true” and “intrusive”
appear to be the ends of a continuum, the close investigation of which can possibly shed light
to the interface between grammar and the human sentence processor.
Covert Partial Wh-Movement in English
Cheng, Lisa / Demirdache, Hamida
Leiden / Nantes
l.l.cheng@leidenuniv.nl;hamida.demirdache@humana.univ-nantes.fr
In this paper, we argue that there is partial wh-movement in English at LF based on the
interpretations of multiple wh-questions in English.
Nominal and Verbal Quotative Constructions in Iberian Spanish
Etxepare, Ricardo
Bayonne
retxepare@euskalnet.net
In colloquial speech, main clauses in Iberian Spanish can be headed by an overt
complementizer (see Spitzer 1942, Porroche Ballesteros 1995, García 1996, Etxepare 2002,
forthcoming):
(1) a. Juan/oye, el Liverpool ha ganado la Champions.
Juan/hey, the Liverpool has won the Champions League
b. Juan/oye, que el Liverpool ha ganado la Champions.
Juan/hey that the Liverpool has won the Champions League
The apparent optionality of the complementizer masks an important semantic difference
between the a- and b-sentences. As a typical declarative sentence, (1a) constitutes an
assertion, whose propositional content is that a given soccer team (Liverpool) has won the
Champions League. Compared to (1a), (1b), uttered with declarative intonation, contributes
the additional meaning that someone else (who is not the speaker) said (1a), such that the
(speaker’s) utterance of (1b) constitutes a report of what has been said. (1b) is thus reported
speech (Coulmas 1986). The two sentences would be produced in quite different situations:
(1a) could be uttered by an agent who has been to the finals match; in such a setting (1b)
would definitely be odd. (1b), on the other hand, would be appropriate if I were listening to
the radio and heard the news that Liverpool won the Champions League. In that case, I could
choose to report on the news by using the root complementizer construction.
This paper is a preliminary analysis of root complementizer constructions in Iberian Spanish.
I will defend the view that root complementizer constructions involve an underlying speech
eventuality. This speech eventuality is syntactically represented in two different ways: (i) as a
VP supporting (eventually overt) thematic material; and (ii) as a DP, contributing an
existential quantification over variables referring to utterances (an analysis similar to Lahiri’s
2002 for double-Comp dependents in Spanish).