Michael Wilson will speak to us in the syntax workshop tomorrow at
2.30pm, the usual place. Here’s a short abstract:

Title: The Dative Illusion

Abstract: I provide evidence from my first GP that people fail to
notice thematic role restrictions on goal arguments of dative verbs
(e.g., give, send) when the goal argument is extracted. However, this
failure only occurs if the verb has an alternative argument structure
compatible with the extracted argument, despite the fact that
participants showed no evidence that they were unconsciously
correcting such sentences. I discuss how these results bear on
different theories of argument structure, arguing for an approach
where restrictions on dative verb goal arguments are encoded in the
verb.