國立清華大學語言學研究所新073次專題演講公告
講者：Tsai-Heng Tiffany Yang (Harvard University)
講題：Licensing Subjects by Labeling
時間：2020年10月28日(星期三) 12:30-14:00
摘要：As pointed out by Rizzi (2016), EPP (Chomsky 1981) and ECP (Chomsky 1981) share one thing in common, that they single out subject positions. That is, the subject position is obligatory and unless certain criteria are met (e.g. the deletion of complementizer that in English), is not a possible launching site for movement. The classical GB proposal did not draw a connection between the two, and the fact that they both single out subjects seems accidental. Chomsky (2015) and Rizzi (2016) both provide a unified account to EPP and ECP in the framework of Labeling Algorithm (LA), associating the two together. Given that the data Chomsky and Rizzi investigate are mainly English and Italian, extending the theory to more languages would be ideal.
Since EPP and ECP single out subject positions, in addition to the two, scrutinizing more constraints concerning subjects (namely Subject Condition and CED) is needed. In this work, I investigate the following familiar constraints with a focus on Mandarin: (i) EPP, (ii) ECP, (iii) Subject Condition (Ross, 1967) and (iv) CED (Huang 1982), and discuss if the typology of different strategies taken to label a syntactic object across languages helps us understand the nature of these constraints better.