Colloquium with Julie Legate, UPenn

TITLE:  " Bridge Verbs within a Null Theory of Movement "

ABSTRACT:  In this talk I discuss the bridge verb phenomenon within a theory of lexical learning and generalization, contrasting the behaviour of clause-embedding verbs in English and Mandarin through corpus and experimental data.  I situate the discussion within an approach to movement whereby movement is successive-cyclic through each projection, and each movement step must be learned. The child assumes no movement is possible until receiving evidence in the input that it is; hence islands are not learned as ungrammatical, but rather are the complement set to the movements that are learned as grammatical.