CRISSP Seminar: Shinichiro Ishihara

CRISSP is happy to announce another installment in the CRISSP Seminar series:

Lecturer: Shinichiro Ishihara (Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main)

Title: The Clause-Mate Condition in Japanese Multiple Cleft

Date & time: 4 November 2010; 16.30-18.00

Location: CRISSP/Hogeschool-Universiteit Brussel, Stormstraat 2, room  E.6111 (EHSAL Research Building)

Participation: free

Abstract:

The Clause-Mate Condition in Japanese Multiple Cleft

This paper claims that the Clause-Mate Condition found in
multiple cleft sentences in Japanese is not a syntactic constraint,
and proposes an alternative account based on the interaction of
prosody and parsing. Assuming the Implicit Prosody Hypothesis (Fodor 1998, 2002), it will be claimed the default ‘silent’ prosody imposes a bias toward the reading in which all foci in a multiple cleft are clause-mates. This account also provides an explanation for the CMC obviation phenomenon observed by Hiraiwa and Ishihara (2002), who claim that multiple wh-clefts are exempt from the CMC.