Article by Tim Hunter and Bob Frank appears in Linguistic Inquiry

May 1, 2014

The current issue of Linguistic Inquiry contains a paper written by former postdoc Tim Hunter (now at Minnesota) and professor Bob Frank. In the article, titled Eliminating rightward movement: Extraposition as flexible linearization of adjuncts,” they propose an account of adjunct extraposition that does not invoke rightward movement. Instead, the noncanonical placement of adjuncts at the right edge of a sentence arises from the very same mechanisms that allow adjuncts to behave flexibly with respect to basic constituency tests and to avoid reconstruction. The system they propose naturally explains the locality restrictions on extraposition and certain interactions between extraposition and movement, and dovetails with an analysis of how adjuncts semantically compose with their hosts.

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