All proceedings
Enter a document #:
Enter search terms:

Info for readers Info for authors Info for editors Info for libraries Order form Shopping cart

Share Paper 1446

When Resumption Determines Reconstruction
Nicolas Guilliot and Nouman Malkawi
168-176 (complete paper or proceedings contents)

Abstract

This paper challenges the traditional minimalist view on A' reconstruction as an exclusive consequence of A' movement (see Chomsky (1995), Sauerland (1998), Aoun et al (2001) among others). The authors introduce novel data from French and Jordanian Arabic showing that reconstruction can occur, through the presence of resumption, within domains that exclude A' movement, i.e., strong islands. They further argue that reconstruction of an XP signals the presence of a copy of that XP rather than movement of that copy, hence allowing for two kinds of reconstruction: reconstruction via movement, and reconstruction via very specific cases of ellipsis. More precisely, they account for unexpected cases of reconstruction within strong islands through NP deletion's analysis of resumptive pronouns (hence generalizing Elbourne (2001)). They finally show how this analysis also nicely accounts for the fact that reconstruction is sensitive to the type of binding condition (positive versus negative conditions) and the type of resumption (weak versus strong resumption).

Published in

Proceedings of the 25th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics
edited by Donald Baumer, David Montero, and Michael Scanlon
Table of contents
Printed edition: $375.00