Alba talking at NYU

Closing the scope of a quantifier in real time.

Friday March 13, Alba Jorquera Jiménez de Aberásturi is up in the Big Apple presenting her work at the NYU Syntax Brown Bag series. In the work, which she did with alum Dave Kush in Toronto, Alba shows that pre-verbal clitic pronouns in Spanish are more sensitive to interference from a preceding quantifier that matches in gender than are post-verbal pronouns, suggesting that the scope of the quantifier has not yet been definitively represented as closed. Her abstract is below. 

Pronouns require feature-matching antecedents, but not all matching NPs are possible antecedents. In (1), the Spanish object pronoun ‘lo’ (him) can take the referential ‘el niño’ (the boy) as an antecedent. However, the quantificational NP (QP) ‘ningún niño’ (no boy) in the same position cannot be the antecedent because QP-pronoun binding dependencies require a c-command relation between the QP and its antecedent. We ask whether the retrieval mechanism is sensitive to this distinction. In two self-paced reading (SPR) experiments, we find that structurally inappropriate QPs can interfere with antecedent retrieval for preverbal, but not postverbal pronouns. I will discuss how to account for our effects in a system where relational cues are dynamically updated in response to bottom-up input.

 Las profesoras que  el/ ningún niño       (no)              respeta  lo    quieren  castigar. 
 The teachers    who the/no       boy      (does not)      respect  him  want      to  punish­.