Vera Gribanova Colloquium February 12!
Vera Gribanova joins us from UC Santa Cruz for a colloquium this afternoon (that’s 3:15pm in the Greenberg Room, of course!). She will inform us about “Extracting Structure from Silence in Russian”
This talk brings novel evidence from Russian Verb-Stranding Phrase Ellipsis (VVPE) to bear on the question of whether Russian verbs — despite being morphophonological words — can be demonstrated to reflect a complex internal syntactic structure. Two independent strands of research — one on verb movement (Bailyn, 1995, inter alia) and one on superlexical prefixation (Svenonius 2004, 2008, Fowler 1994, Babko-Malaya 2003, inter alia) — suggest that Russian verbs in canonical clauses appear on the surface in a position between T (the syntactic expression of Tense) and VP, and that this position hosts aspectual morphology and semantics. If the verb originates as the head of VP, it follows that the inflected verb must be constructed from syntactically independent sub-parts (via head-movement or lexical sharing of some kind). This talk defends and explores three claims about VVPE which relate to these issues: first, that its properties are distinct from those of object drop in Russian; second, that there is a condition requiring that the stranded verb in VVPE be identical to the verb of the antecedent, a condition which flows from semantic licensing conditions on ellipsis; and finally, that the existence and form of this identity requirement, when probed carefully, are expected and understandable given the hypothesis that the verbal complex is constructed from syntactically independent sub-parts.
All are welcome!