Colloquium with Keir Moulton, University of Toronto

Title:

Clausal prolepsis, Islands, and the D/C connection

Abstract:

In clausal prolepsis constructions, a clause is doubled by a pronoun or demonstrative (1).

1.      a.   I love it that there’s cookies after the colloq.

b.     That’s great that you are coming to semantics reading group.

Once correctly separated from expletive constructions (Ruys 2010), prolepsis constructions pose a puzzle because one argument slot is expressed twice. In joint work with Wesley Orth (UofT), we revive a Rosenbaum-style account in which prolepsis constructions are generated as DP constituents (Sudhoff 1996, Angelopoulos 2023), where the determiner it selects CP. We will present new experimental evidence that clarifies the island status of clausal prolepsis (Kiparsky and Kiparsky 1970, Postal and Pullum 1988). Prolepsis constructions are more opaque for wh-movement than ‘bare’ CPs, but less opaque than complex NPs. We argue that this follows on our account and not on competitor accounts (Angelopoulos 2023, Longenbaugh 2019). Further evidence for the analysis comes from close examination of cases like (1b) where the proleptic element is a demonstrative. I will end with a discussion of why (certain) CPs participate in prolepsis, focusing on debates about the nominal nature of C across languages.