David Lightfoot

Georgetown University


Maryland Linguistics Colloquium

Friday, February 6, 2004 
2:00pm

Room 1304, Marie Mount Hall 

University of Maryland, College Park


"Deletion: clitics and their cues"


Copied elements must delete; Nunes (1995) showed why and I will ask how. I shall re-visit 1980s work on "lexical government," consider some "pure" deletion cases (no copying), some properties of clitics and some new phenomena, arguing that deletion of phrasal categories is a form of cliticization. A single idea at the level of UG will yield a complex range of data when it interacts with demonstrably learnable properties. For this to work, children must learn certain things. We shall consider how a cue-based approach to acquisition would describe the necessary learning.

handout [PDF]


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