LangSci Lunch Talk: Mike McCourt (PHIL)

Sometimes an aspect of speaker meaning corresponds to no audible expression in the sentence uttered. E.g., 'The ship was sunk to collect the insurance' can be used to mean that the ship was sunk so that the sinker might collect the insurance. Implicit control is a unique kind of anaphora in that both anaphor (the understood collector) and antecedent (the implied sinker) are unpronounced. In four self-paced reading time studies, we investigate the processing of different varieties of implicit control with the goal of finding evidence for or against a standard syntactic account of the phenomena. At the end of the day, we find no evidence that supports the standard account using reading times as a measure. Indeed, our results undermine a familiar line of argument in support of the standard account. We conclude by suggesting future directions. Though most of this work has been presented already, this is our first opportunity to report the full set of results and to make some strong conclusions.