Mark Baltin

New York University | NYU · Department of Linguistics

This paper examines an anaphoric construction, British English do, and locates it within the dichotomy in the ellipsis literature between deleted phrases and null pro-forms, concluding that the choice is a false one, in that pro-forms involve deletion as well; the question, then, is how to account for the differential permeability to dependencies t...

Many languages have what look like “doubly filled Comps,” in which a wh-phrase is said to occur in the specifier position of CP (Spec,CP) and an invariant “complementizer” is posited as the head of CP. An example from Belfast English is given in (1).1 1. They discussed a certain model, but they didn’t know which model that they discussed. Other so-...

Thesis. 1978. Ph.D.--Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy. MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND HUMANITIES. Bibliography: leaves 194-202. Ph.D.

This paper is about the syntax and semantics of non-finite clausal complementation. By focusing on the properties of a small and comparat ively neglected class of non-finite complements in English, this paper wi ll shed light on the larger class of non-finite complements that have been the subject of much discussion, arguing that selection for comp...

Elided VPs and their antecedent VPs can mismatch in voice, with passive VPs being elided under apparent identity with active antecedent VPs, and vice versa. Such voice mismatches are not allowed in any other kind of ellipsis, such as sluicing and other clausal ellipses. These latter facts indicate that the identity relation in ellipsis is sensitive...

This article shows that a VP in English is only a VP at the outset of a derivation, and that VP preposing in English is in fact preposing of the internal arguments of the verb, followed by remnant movement of the original VP, making English and German (Muller 1998) more similar than they might appear at first glance. The evidence for the nonconstit...

Outline In this talk we present a unified theory of pronouns, traces and ellipsis sites. We argue that pronouns (or more generally, proforms) are not a primitive of the theory, but rather that they are defined configurationally as a functional head whose complement has been elided. Empirical parallelisms between traces, pronouns and ellipsis (i) tr...

1 Overview In the traditional E-type approach to d-(onkey)-pronouns, these pronouns are inter-preted as definite descriptions that contain a bound i-(ndividual)-variable (Evans, 1977; Cooper, 1979; Heim, 1990). Elbourne (2001, 2002); Büring (2004) have recently pro-posed a variant of the E-type approach which dispenses with i-variable binding for d...

This paper argues that Principle A is not `an anywhere principle',contrary to Belletti and Rizzi (1988) and much subsequent work, but must apply relatively late in derivations, perhaps at the end of each phase (Chomsky 2000). Evidence comesprincipally from the analysis of pseudo-gapping, in which the ellipsis remnant isextracted to a position outsi...

Boeckx and Stjepanovic (2001) claim to have evidence from the analysis of pseudogapping that head movement is best viewed as occurring, not in the overt syntax, but in the PF component. In this squib I will show that all the movements that are needed in the analysis of pseudogapping are phrasal, hence that the analysis of pseudogapping says nothing...

Pesetsky's (1987) ''aggressively non-D-linked'' wh-phrases (like who the hell; hereinafter, wh-the-hell phrases) exhibit a variety of syntactic and semantic peculiarities, including the fact that they cannot occur in situ and do not support nonecho readings when occurring in root multiple questions. While these are familiar from the literature (alb...

While we agree that the base-generated phonologically null nominal known as PRO has Case, we dispute the recent contention of Chomsky & Lasnik (1995) and Martin(2001) that there is a special Null Case, assigned in English by certain instances of infinitival to. We show that, contrary to Martin's claims, there is no consistent distinction between in...

L'A. examine l'argument de Safir concernant l'existence de phrases avec un sujet apparemment au pluriel mais avec un accord verbal au singulier (ex : Workers angry about the pay is just the sort of situation that the ad campaign was designed to avoid). Il montre que cette apparente difference d'accord censee fournir une preuve en faveur de la const...

In order to account for preposition stranding in English pseudopassives and apparent cases of non-c-command in which the object of a preposition serves as the antecedent to an anaphor outside the PP projection dominating the antecedent, extensive use has been made of a proposed operation of preposition incorporation with a governing verb. We demons...

Cinque’s paper, “On the Scope of Long and Successive Cyclic Movement,” is an important refinement of an approach to the Empty Category Principle developed by Rizzi (1990). It argues against the relevance of θ-government, a cornerstone of Chomsky (1986), to the notion of proper government, and views the ECP as requiring that traces meet two simultan...

In the early years of generative grammar it was assumed that the appropriate mechanism for generating syntactic structures was a grammar of context-free rewriting rules. The twelve essays in this volume discuss recent challenges to this classical formulation of phrase structure and the alternative conceptions proposed to replace it. Each article ap...