Microparameters in a Tiny Space: Stranding at the Edge

Date
Fri June 7th 2019, 2:00pm
Location
Margaret Jacks Hall, Greenberg Room (460-126)
Jim McCloskey
University of California, Santa Cruz

 

In a paper published some years ago (2002), I examined a previously un-recognized species of quantifier float, one in which a universal quantifier ('all') associates at a distance with a fronted wh-pronoun in a constituent question. The pattern is characteristic of the Englishes of certain sub-communities in the northwest corner of Ireland.  In this talk I return to the issues raised by those observations in a new context. The new context is defined in part by certain advances in syntactic theory, but also by careful follow-up studies of the phenomenon carried out by Lisa Hegarty (2011), Alison Henry (2012) and others. These studies have uncovered a complex pattern of micro-variation (which I was mostly unaware of at the time of my initial work) with respect to the quantifier-stranding phenomenon -- variation which seems to be centered on networks of speakers which are very small indeed and which can be well described (as far as the syntax goes) in terms of the (im)possibility of stranding at various phase-edges. The paper (i) asks what theory of syntactic variation best allows an understanding of such patterns and (ii) contemplates the very difficult issues for the theory of acquisition that now arise.