The next ComSyn meeting will take place on Tuesday 4 December.
Speaker: Erik Schoorlemmer (LUCL)
Title: The Prohibition that never was. Extraction, blocking and genitive noun complements in Serbo-Croatian.
Time: 15:15-16:30
Venue: Lipsius 235c
Abstract
In Serbo-Croatian, sentences in which a genitive form of the Serbo-Croatian counterpart of who is extracted out of a noun complement position are ungrammatical (Zlatić 1997, Bašić 2004, Bošković 2011). This has been taken as evidence that there is a general prohibition on the extraction of noun complements in Serbo-Croatian (see among others Bošković 2011). In this talk, I, however, claim that such a prohibition doesn’t exist. Instead, I will show that the ungrammaticality of extracting genitive who is due to a more general effect: the use of a genitive form is blocked if a prenominal possessive form can be used. I will propose a tentative account of this blocking in terms of head movement.