Abstract for Jim Wood's talk

Icelandic Imposters and the Proprial Article
Jim Wood (New York University)
December 9, 2008 (Tuesday)
6:30 PM - 8:00 PM; Room 7102, The CUNY Graduate Center

Collins & Postal (2008) discusses mismatches of grammatical and notional person in DPs. They refer to such DPs as imposters. In (1), this reporter is an imposter, since it is grammatically third-person (w.r.t. agreement, for example) but notionally first-person, in that it refers to the speaker.

(1) At the time, CBS news and this reporter fully believed the documents were genuine.

Collins & Postal (2008) discuss a wide range of syntactic phenomena which interact with imposters, including binding, antecedence, obligatory control, tag questions, and the structure of pronominals and DPs. In this talk, I will present data from Icelandic and discuss the interaction between imposters, verbal agreement, and the Proprial Article (PA) (Sigurðsson 2006). The PA is a pronoun that optionally precedes a name or kinship term without any intonation break.

(2) Hún Anna sendi hann Jón til hennar Maríu.
She.nom Anna.nom sent he.acc John.acc to she.gen Mary.gen
'Anna sent John to Mary.'

Some of the generalizations that emerge include: (i ) verbal agreement is always with the PA when present, (ii) the PA can only appear when the DP does not have a non-suffixed article, (iii) singular imposters only allow third-person PA, (iv) plural imposters only allow first- or second-person PAs, (v) though first-person imposters coordinated with a second-person pronoun (e.g. you and Daddy) cannot take second-person plural agreement without a PA, a second-person plural PA may occur with a first-person imposter (you.PL Daddy), in which case verbal agreement must be second-person plural.

I will also compare this data to English (Collins & Postal 2008; Guitard et al. 2008) and Bellinzonese (Cattaneo 2007).

References
Cattaneo, Andrea. 2007. Imposters and Subject Clitics: Four different types of Imposters in Bellinzonese. Manuscript, New York University.
Collins, Chris and Paul Postal. 2008. Imposters. Manuscript, New York University. Available on lingBuzz/000640.
Guitard, Stephanie N., Jim Wood and Chris Collins. 2008. Imposters: An Online Survey of Grammaticality Judgements. Manuscript, New York University.
Sigurðsson, Halldór Ármann. 2006. The Icelandic Noun Phrase: Central Traits. Arkiv för nordisk filologi 121:193-236.