Join the Linguistics Department for Ethan Poole’s talk “Syntactic Variables and Semantic Minimality” in collaboration with Zahra Mirrazi.

In this talk, Poole argues that when two syntactic variables are “related” and stand in a c- command relationship at LF, a 3⁄4-pattern emerges: free/free, bound/bound, bound/free, and *free/bound. Several otherwise-disparate puzzles are shown to fall under this pattern: Dahl’s Puzzle, SCO effects, the Nested DP Constraint, exceptional de dicto, de re blocking, and certain restrictions on fake indexicals. Building on Drummond 2014, Poole proposes that these phenomena reflect a minimality-style constraint on variables: (roughly) a variable may not be bound across a related free variable. The notion of “related”, we define in terms of overlap in value and counterparts, an extension of Reinhart’s (2006) covaluation. He argues that this “semantic minimality” does not straightforwardly reduce to the garden-variety syntactic minimality; rather, he suggests that syntactic and semantic minimality are separate, convergent consequences of pressure for shorter dependencies.

This event is in-person with an option to join virtually available.