July 28, 2003

Time:

4:30pm, July 28, 2003

Place:

Conference room, 3rd floor, Building 10, College of Arts and Sciences, University of Tokyo Komaba campus

Speaker:

Uli Sauerland (Universitaet Tuebingen)

Title:

Local Binding and AgreementOn Semantic Agreement Licensing

Abstract:

I argue for the following constraint (Condition Phi): Any variable binder must bind the closest occurrence of a variable it c-commands and that it must agree with (according to the agreement rules of e.g. Heim 1994, unpublished handout, and von Stechow 2003, Proceedings of NELS 33.) I present three pieces of evidence for Condition Phi: from world variables of verbs, from de se/de re pronouns, and from distributive/collective pronouns. I then show the Condition Phi can be deduced from a standard syntactic condition, namely the minimal link condition. (The talk is based on joint work with Orin Percus, see our two joint papers available from the Semantics Archive www.semanticsarchive.net)