The ban on headless XP-movement is not narrow syntactic

This paper argues that the ban on headless XP-movement should not be captured in narrow syntactic terms. That is, there is no constraint in the syntactic computation preventing remnant movement of a phrase from which the head has been extracted, i.e., so-called Takano’s Generalization is wrong. This is demonstrated through a case study of the emphatic doubling construction in Rioplatense Spanish, which requires a derivation proceeding exactly along these lines. It is further argued that the relevant prohibition should be stated as a condition that applies at PF: A preliminary conjecture on the nature of this prohibition is also offered.

Predicate fronting in Yiddish and conditions on multiple copy Spell-Out

Predicate fronting with doubling (also known as the predicate cleft) has long been a challenge for theories of syntax that do not predict the pronunciation of multiple occurrences. Previous analyses that derive the construction via syntactic movement, including those attributing verb doubling to the formation of parallel chains (e.g., Aboh 2006; Kandybowicz 2008), are incompatible with remnant movement (Müller 1998), which does not give rise to doubling. This article presents data from the predicate fronting construction in Yiddish, in which verbs always double but complements never do. I argue that these seemingly contradictory pronunciation facts can be reconciled even if one assumes that phrasal movement and head movement are both syntactic. More specifically, the pronunciation of occurrences in Yiddish (doubled or not) follows from the general conditions on Spell-Out (or Transferpf) defined by Collins and Stabler (2016), modified only to accommodate syntactic head movement. Post-syntactic PF repairs are thus not required to account for the facts of the Yiddish predicate fronting construction. If such repairs are needed to generate doubling phenomena in other languages, they should be explicitly defined so as to modify or override the predictions of default Spell-Out conditions.

Introduction

The introduction outlines the scope of the volume and defines smuggling as involving two steps (Step A is a pied-piping, and Step B is extraction). It is pointed out that in terms of the order of the steps involved, smuggling is the reverse of remnant movement. The possible range of smuggling operations is discussed, including a case of smuggling in the domain of A′ movement from Italian. Lastly, the contributions to the volume are summarized.

Remnant movement and smuggling in some romance interrogative clauses

This chapter analyzes the syntax of interrogative clauses in French and in some Northern Italian dialects (NIDs), including so-called “wh-in-situ” configurations. It shows that their intricate properties can be derived from standard computations (“wh-movement” and remnant movement of vP/IP to a Top/ground slot) to either the vP Left periphery (“LLP”) or the CP domain (“HLP”). If so, it becomes necessary to raise the question of why some languages make use of the LLP or the HLP, or indeed both, like French, as argued in sections 2–7. In significant cases the morphological properties of the various Wh-words and the surface forms of the sentences provide all the clues required by the language learner and the linguist. In French, movement of interrogative pronouns to the HLP is actually movement to a free relative layer. This is an automatic consequence of the fact that, as in Germanic, most French and Romance wh-items are morphologically both (free) relative and interrogative pronouns. This will explain the distribution of French Quoi (what)—only an interrogative pronoun—and similar items in a number of NIDs (Che in Bellunese and Illasi, Què in Borgomanerese and Monese). In the same vein, sections 9–11 show that the fact that French Que is both an interrogative and relative element, in addition to being a clitic qua interrogative, will account for its properties in conjunction with a “smuggling” analysis of Subject Clitic Inversion (SCLI). Sections 14–16 show that many NIDs make use of both the LLP and the HLP and that smuggling is involved in deriving the form and interpretation of interrogative clauses in Bellunese, Illasi, and Monese. In addition to renewed empirical arguments in favor of remnant movement and smuggling, sections 2–7 argue that embedded interrogative infinitives in (at least) French are vPs and only have a (sometimes truncated) LLP. In addition to the fruitfulness of the “smuggling” idea for Romance, the main theoretical result of this chapter is that the interrogative syntax of the languages and dialects studied here supports the idea that “relative constructions” or “interrogative constructions” are not primitives of the language faculty, since in significant cases the derivation of questions activates both the interrogative side of the LLP and the (free) relative side of the HLP.

Raising to Ergative: Remarks on Applicatives of Unaccusatives

Applicatives of unaccusatives provide a crucial test case for the inherent-case view of ergativity. If ergative is assigned only to external arguments, in their θ-positions, there can be no “raising to ergative” in applicative unaccusatives; an internal argument subject can never receive ergative case. In this article, I present evidence from Nez Perce (Sahaptian) that this prediction is false. In Nez Perce applicative unaccusatives, the theme argument raises over the applicative argument and is accordingly marked with ergative case. Nez Perce thus demonstrates raising to ergative. Departing from Baker’s (2014) conclusions for similar phenomena in Shipibo (Panoan), I argue that apparently nonlocal movement of the theme in the raising-to-ergative pattern involves not a covert adpositional structure, but rather a response to independently motivated constraints on antilocal movement and remnant movement.

vP-fronting with and without remnant movement

In this paper, we consider two kinds of vP-fronting constructions in English and argue that they receive quite different analyses. First, we show that English vP-preposing does not have the properties that would be expected of a movement-derived dependency. Evidence for this conclusion is adduced from the licensing conditions on its occurrence, from the availability of morphological mismatches, and from reconstruction facts. By contrast, we show that English participle preposing is a well-behaved case of vP-movement, contrasting with vP-preposing with respect to reconstruction properties in particular. We propose that the differences between the two constructions follow from the interaction of two constraints: the excluded middle constraint (EMC), which rules out derivations involving spellout of linearly intermediate copies only, and the N-only constraint, which restricts movement to occurring where the trace position would license a nominal. The EMC rules out deriving vP-fronting by true movement and instead necessitates a base-generation analysis, while the N-only constraint ensures that participle preposing is only possible in limited circumstances.

Phonological Movement in Ukrainian

Extant accounts of scrambling in Ukrainian generally don’t extend past object- and other NP-related processes (Féry et al. 2007, Mykhaylyk 2010). Analysis of Slavic scrambling as XP movement (Corver 1992, Bošković 2005) runs into problems with split constituency, as does OT syntax (Gouskova 2001). Remnant movement (Sekerina 1997, Bašić 2004) runs afoul of Slavic data and theory too (Pereltsvaig 2008, Kariaeva 2009). Analyses that mix syntax with prosody (Antonyuk-Yudina & Mykhaylyk 2013; Mykhaylyk 2012) are more promising but also fail. Ukrainian scrambles only prosodic entities, ignores core principles of syntax, and respects core principles of phonology.The driving force behind the scrambling is not our focus here. It is generally assumed to be pragmatic in nature, based on things like topic, focus, and givenness (e.g., Féry et al. 2007). Fanselow & Lenertová have recently argued against this, however, and claim for most scrambling that ‘accentuation rather than informational status determines which categories can be fronted’ (2012:169); their findings support Chomsky’s (2008) view that information structure does not result in movement. We leave this to future research and focus here on which part of the grammar the movement takes place in. We propose that Ukrainian scrambling is phonological movement of exactly the sort found in Ancient Greek and Latin (Agbayani & Golston 2010, 2016), and similar to the more limited type found in Japanese (Agbayani, Golston & Ishii 2015) and Irish (Bennett, Elfner, & McCloskey 2016).