Return to Richard

Ash Asudeh

Institute of Cognitive Science, Carleton University & Faculty of Linguistics, Philology & Phonetics, Oxford University

Lattimore 513

The phenomenon known as copy raising, exemplified in (1), has received comparatively little attention in linguistic theory, despite our long obsession with the syntax and semantics of raising and control.

(1) The President seems like he does not understand the real issues.

Confounded by the construction, Rogers proposed a bespoke transformational rule, which he called "Richard", in the earliest modern theoretical work on the topic. In this talk, I will once again return to Richard. I will explore the syntax and semantics of this little corner of grammar and show how it continues to confound but also that it promises to reveal much about not just the true nature of control and raising, but also the syntax and semantics of comparatives, micro-variation, evidentiality, and perception. The first three of these have been enormous areas of endeavour in their own right in recent linguistic theory. The last less so, but I will argue that it is high time we paid more attention to it and that it promises a fascinating interdisciplinary future for linguistics and cognitive science.

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