Syntax Seminar: Richard Stockwell and Carson Schütze

Richard Stockwell and Carson Schütze will be giving two joint practice talks for the Linguistic Society of America meeting in January.

1. Dialects “haven’t got” to be the same: modal microvariation in English
We propose a unified analysis of dialectal differences between British (Br) and North American (NoAm) English regarding ‘have-got’ – its modal scope with respect to negation and its behaviour in verb phrase ellipsis (VPE). The outright ungrammaticality of negated universal deontic ‘have-got’ in NoAm is attributed to LF reconstruction of modal ‘have’ being blocked by the overt spellout of its trace as ‘got’; whereas in Br, deontic modality resides in ‘got’ and no reconstruction problem arises. Meanwhile, the ‘have’ of ‘have-got’ survives VPE in Br, but undergoes it in NoAm where ellipsis means there is no overt ‘got’.

2. Objectless Locative Prepositions in British English
This paper clarifies the cross-dialectal landscape and challenges Griffiths & Sailor’s (2015, 2017) (G&S) A-movement analysis of objectless locative prepositions (OLPs) in British English, e.g. This film-i has monsters in __i. OLPs are restricted to in and on for southern speakers, reflecting a need for the possession to be inherent. We argue in favour of a null pronominal analysis, which still covers G&S’s A-movement data, but extends empirically to bound variable interpretations and typologically to Germanic R-pronouns.