Past Event

VP-fronting: movement vs. dislocation

Dr. Dennis Ott
(University of Ottawa)

The goal of this talk is to show that VP-fronting is not a uniform construction type but can be realized in at least two different ways across languages. Specifically, I will argue that while VP- fronting in German is Aʹ-movement to the CP edge, English VP-fronting is VP-dislocation with a null nominal resumptive. I spell out this proposal in terms of Ott’s (2014) approach to left- dislocation, according to which dislocated XPs are elliptical sentence fragments, and show that it successfully accounts for various asymmetries as well as commonalities between German and English VP-fronting. These are shown to follow from the fact that it is VP itself that moves in German VP-fronting, whereas it is its nominal placeholder in the English construction. I discuss various implications of the approach and compare it to a recent proposal by Thoms & Walkden (2015) that seeks to explain properties of English VP-fronting in terms of a ‘matching’ structure.

About the Presenter

Dr. Dennis Ott received his PhD from Harvard in 2011, and has been a visiting scholar at MIT and the Humboldt University of Berlin. He recently joined the faculty at the University of Ottawa. His dissertation work was on the syntax of split topics, and he is more broadly interested in syntactic theory and its interfaces with pragmatics and phonology.