时间：2015年6月4日（周四）10:00-11:30

地点：同济大学外国语学院汇文楼418

主讲人：John Payne

讲座题目：Pronouns and the Genitive Alternation

主讲人介绍

John Payne, one of the founders of Functional Grammar, is Professor of Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Manchester, UK, where he acts as Head of Department of Linguistics. He has held visiting positions at a number of universities in the US, Europe and Australia. He has published　numerous articles on linguistic typology, syntactic theory, and the grammar of　English. He is one of the co-authors of the Cambridge Grammar of the English　Language (Cambridge University Press 2002), a book which has remained a best seller  in　the world since its publication.

讲座内容概要

The observation that personal pronouns typically sound very unnatural as the object in of-PP dependents of English noun phrases dates back at least to Lyons (1986). There is a striking contrast, for example. between the of-PP in the car of him and the ’sgenitive in his car. Recent large-scale psycholinguistic and corpus studies of the genitive alternation (Rosenbach 2002, Börjarset al 2012), O’Connor et al 2012) appear to support this general picture: personal pronouns appear almost categorically excluded from the of-PP construction whenever the ’s genitive alternative is permitted. In this paper it is shown that pronouns nevertheless occur quite systematically in the of-PP environment, and that their behaviour is largely predictable from the general characteristics of the genitive alternation.