Rob Pasternak (Leibniz-ZAS Berlin)
A fuss-free semantics for copy composition
Traditionally, displacement — the apparent tendency for constituents to simultaneously occupy multiple syntactic locations — has been cast in terms of movement. However, in pursuit of his Minimalist Program, Chomsky (1995) recasts displacement in terms of copies: a constituent occupies multiple locations by having a copy at each. But this copy theory of movement presents a conundrum with respect to the semantic interpretation of scopal elements like quantificational DPs: we seem to want lower copies to be interpreted (roughly) as bound variables, and higher copies to be interpreted as true scope-bearing elements. A few possible outs have been proposed, including (1) Fox's (2002, 2003) operation of trace conversion, which syntactically converts lower copies of quantificational DPs to bound definites; and (2) Johnson's (2012) approach, in which "quantificational" determiners have the same denotations as bound definites to begin with, with other heads contributing the quantificational force traditionally associated with those determiners. In this talk I will offer an alternative, in which determiners contribute their own quantificational force (contra Johnson) and are interpreted identically at each copy (contra Fox), but the semantic effects of trace conversion are enforced through straightforward bottom-up compositional principles.