Evaluation order, crossover, and reconstruction

Abstract

This paper explores an approach to reconstruction that falls into the general category of semantic reconstruction: the syntax and the semantics collaborate in order to account for a number of reconstruction effects, but without any syntactic movement. The analysis builds on Shan and Barker 2006, Barker and Shan 2008, and Barker 2009. Shan and Barker 2006:123 note that at least some reconstruction effects fall out from the interaction of their particular analyses of scope-taking, binding, and wh-interrogatives. In Barker 2009, I discuss that account of reconstruction, developing especially some of the details of the the treatment of questions and higher-order pronoun meanings. These previous discussions, however, considered only a very small range of example types. One of the main goals of the current paper is to see how well the approach scales up to a wider range of reconstruction effects and example types, including quantificational binding, binding of anaphors, idiom licensing, and especially crossover phenomena, in the context of whinterrogatives, relative clauses, and wh-relatives. Although the analyses just mentioned differ small ways, they all share core assumptions and goals with the account presented here. I will call the general strategy they develop the evaluation order approach. The central goal is to explain crossover effects as following from imposing a default left-to-right evaluation order: