LangSci Lunch Talk: Jeff Green (LING)

Food and ideas bring people together.  Our weekly lunch talk series provides students and faculty with the opportunity to present their in-progress work to a supportive, interdisciplinary audience.

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The syntax and processing of the control of reason clauses

There are at least two different major classes of anaphors: those whose reference is determined via syntactic binding, such as himself in (1), and those whose reference is determined via discourse (him in (2)).
(1) John likes himself.
(2) John thinks Mary likes him.
There are some cases where it is not clear. This talk will discuss one such case: the null subject of a reason clause (PRO in (3-4)). I will present syntactic as well as adult processing evidence (Self-Paced Reading and ERP), concluding that (4) must be a discourse dependency, and (3) is still unclear.
(3) The cop left the building in order [PRO to arrest the thief].
(4) The cop left the building. The goal was [PRO to arrest the thief].
This study has implications not only for syntactic theory, but also for the ability of psycholinguistic measures to distinguish between different kinds of dependencies.