Argument asymmetries revisited: Variation in parallelism constraints on ATB-movement

The proposed project involves Dr. Andrew Murphy (The University of Chicago) as the researcher and Prof. Dr. Doreen Georgi (University of Potsdam) as the supervisor. The project title is ‘Argument asymmetries revisited: Variation in parallelism constraints on ATB-movement’. This project will investigate the phenomenon of parallelism conditions in so-called Across-the-Board dependencies.

On the empirical side, the project aims to broaden the empirical base through a comparative study of tolerable mismatches between argument types in ATB-constructions on the basis of three languages (English, German, Polish) that also takes into account the role of variation.

On the theoretical side, the project will incorporate these findings into a general theory of cross-linguistic argument asymmetries involving movement, a goal which has not yet been seriously pursued in contemporary syntactic research.