Second person contains first
Abstract: This paper sketches a compositional theory of person features which aims to capture the typology of local person inventories. Following arguments made by Harbour (2016), I show that the typology of person inventories is suggestive of a deep asymmetry in how utterance authors and hearers are morpho-syntactically encoded (though the analysis I give differs from Harbour’s account in the locus of that asymmetry, and makes novel predictions about person indexicality). The inventory of person features I motivate is one in which second person is defined compositionally in relation to first, and I show how that analytic point bears on the typology of person inventories in light of independently motivated conditions on the use of definite descriptions.
Sloppy identity without ellipsis
Abstract: Sloppy identity obtains under ellipsis even when the gender of an overt pronoun in the antecedent doesn’t match the gender of the elided pronoun’s binder. Two phenomena that have been hypothesized to derive from ellipsis, Across-the-Board movement and Right Node Raising, do not have this property: sloppy identity can obtain under ATB and RNR, but the form of the overt pronoun must match the gender of all binders. In this paper, I develop a novel way of getting sloppy identity, which I explicate with RNR. The account derives the contrast between ellipsis and RNR with regard to gender.
Learning syntactic parameters without triggers by assigning credit and blame
(Joint work with Brandon Prickett, Shay Hucklebridge, Max Nelson, Rajesh Bhatt, Gaja Jarosz, Kyle Johnson, and Joe Pater)
Kaden Holladay 