April 4, 2008: Orin Percus, Interpretable but not interpreted

Anaphora aside, we tend to assume that an item that is associated with one interpretation in one context is associated with the same interpretation in all other contexts. And in particular, we tend to assume that an item that is associated with an interpretation in one context cannot go entirely uninterpreted in another context. But these assumptions could be questioned.

Different strands of my recent research suggest that, in fact, items that are in principle associated with an interpretation can sometimes go ignored. In this talk I will discuss two quite different areas where this conclusion seems plausible. I will argue that pronouns go uninterpreted in certain constructions—this is the case for certain resumptive pronouns in particular. And I will suggest that the same is true of gender features on nouns in languages such as Italian.