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Locative Inversion, PP Topicalization, and Weak Crossover in English

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 November 2021

BENJAMIN BRUENING
BENJAMIN BRUENING*
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics and Cognitive Science University of Delaware, bruening@udel.edu
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Abstract

The literature on locative inversion in English currently disputes whether locative inversion differs from PP topicalization in permitting a quantifier in the fronted PP to bind a pronoun in the subject. In order to resolve this dispute, this paper runs two experiments on Amazon Mechanical Turk, one an acceptability judgment task and the other a forced-choice task. Both find that PP topicalization does not differ from locative inversion: both permit variable binding. Locative inversion also does not differ from a minimally different sentence with the overt expletive there. These findings remove an argument against the null expletive analysis of English locative inversion, and they also show that weak crossover is not uniformly triggered by A-bar movement.

Keywords

locative inversiontopicalizationweak crossovervariable binding
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 58 , Issue 4 , November 2022 , pp. 739 - 757
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

Thanks to Amanda Payne, for running the experiments on Mechanical Turk, and to the Journal of Linguistics reviewers, for helpful comments.

References

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