Locative Inversion, PP Topicalization, and Weak Crossover in English

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...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of linguistics Vol. 58; no. 4; pp. 739 - 757
Main Author BRUENING, BENJAMIN
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Cambridge, UK Cambridge University Press 01.11.2022
Subjects
Acceptability
Binding
English language
Experiments
Expletives
Grammatical case
Reading
Syntactic movement
topicalization
weak crossover
variable binding
locative inversion
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ISSN0022-2267
1469-7742
DOI10.1017/S0022226721000414

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Summary: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.
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ISSN:0022-2267
1469-7742
DOI:10.1017/S0022226721000414