Relativism and Universalism in Linguistics - Fachbereich 10 ...

Wednesday, August 30, 2006
Section D: Pronouns
Conference room: GW1 A0150
11:30–12:00 Acuña Fariña, Juan Carlos (University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain)
Activeness and the Minimal Chain Principle: Spanish se reflexives, passives
and impersonals do not wait even for minimal chains
12:00–12:30 Cerrón-Palomino López, Alvaro (University of Southern California)
Subject Resumptive Pronouns in Spanish Relative Clauses: Universalism or
Relativism?
12:30–13:00 Helmbrecht, Johannes (Univeristy of Erfurt)
Personal pronouns - a corpus analysis and its implications for language
typology
Lunch break
15:00–15:30 Siewierska, Anna (Lancaster University) / Hollmann, Willem (Lancaster
University)
Explaining the my vs. me variation in Lancashire dialect: a usage-based
grammar.
15:30–16:00 Lai, Vicky Tzuyin (University of Colorado, Boulder)
Pragmatic Functions of First Person Singular Pronouns in Classical Chinese
16:00–16:30 Razímová, Magda (Charles University, Prague)
System of Pronominal Words in Czech with Respect to German and English*
Activeness and the Minimal Chain Principle:
Spanish se reflexives, passives and impersonals do not wait even
for minimal chains
Acuña Fariña, Juan Carlos
University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain
iacanoe@usc.es
De Vincenzi´s (1991, 1996, 1998) Minimal Chain Principle (MCP) postulates a preference by
the human parser to opt for structures with no movement over competing structures with
(hypothesized) movement. The general idea of the MCP is that displacement is costly for the
mind because it delays phrasal packaging. The reason for this is that resources need to be
spent on ‘undoing’ movement and reconstructing an underlying SVO template before the
right who-did-what-to-whom order can be sent to a semantic component for post-syntactic
analysis. As conceived, the MCP works as follows: on recognising a gap the parser initiates
an active search for a filler and preferentially construes any displaced phrase as one. Here I
argue that the activeness of an MCP type of processor is unnecessarily constrained by the
MCP granting invisibility to any phrase that occupies a lawful deep structure position. Data