A-Scrambling Exists!

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Locality in A-movement

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy, 1998.Includes bibliographical references (leaves [219]-229).In this dissertation, I demonstrate that the feature-based Attract theory of syntactic movement solves several empirical challenges for Relativized Minimality, while incorporating its key insights. Chapter 1 introduces the theory of phrase structure, syntactic movement, and abstract Case to be adopted throughout the dissertation. This chapter also lays out a cross-linguistic typology of possibilities for A-movement to the subject position. Chapter 2 concerns cases of advancing,where the argument generated highest is attracted by the feature (EPP) driving movement to the subject position. Here locality interacts with a condition (Case Identification) preventing an argument from "pied-piping" to check EPP if it checks Case elsewhere. In some instances, advancing is forced jointly by locality and Case Identification. Given two equally local arguments, Case Identification determines which can be attracted to the subject position. However, newly identified "superraising" violations support the view that locality is respected even if the highest argument has already checked Case. In the first part of Chapter 3, I argue for the central empirical proposal of this dissertation, Lethal Ambiguity: an anaphoric dependency cannot be established between two specifiers of the same head. I contend that one argument can A-scramble past another only by entering, or leapfrogging through, a multiple-specifier configuration with it. In either case, no anaphoric dependency can be established between the two arguments. In the second part of Chapter 3, I present cases of leapfrogging in A-movement to the subject position, also subject to Lethal Ambiguity. Chapter 4 extends the empirical coverage of Lethal Ambiguity to answer a long-standing question from the literature-namely, why anaphoric clitics cannot be object clitics, I argue that Lethal Ambiguity rules out the object clitic derivation for anaphors because an anaphoric object checks Case in a multiple-specifier configuration with the would-be antecedent. I adopt a passive-like derivation for the well-formed anaphoric clitic construction, where the clitic is a categorically underspecified external argument. Since this argument cannot be attracted to check Case or EPP, the object can skip over it to the subject position without Lethal Ambiguity arising. The remainder of the chapter is devoted to other potential cases of skipping.by Martha Jo McGinnis.Ph.D

Negation and the functional sequence

There exists a general restriction on admissible functional sequences which prevents adjacent identical heads. We investigate a particular instantiation of this restriction in the domain of negation. Empirically, it manifests itself as a restriction the stacking of multiple negative morphemes. We propose a principled account of this restriction in terms of the general ban on immediately consecutive identical heads in the functional sequence on the one hand, and the presence of a Neg feature inside negative morphemes on the other hand. The account predicts that the stacking of multiple negative morphemes should be possible provided they are separated by intervening levels of structure. We show that this prediction is borne out

Locality and inert case

The claim I argue for here is that movement to subject position is constrained by structural locality. I begin with the familiar observation that there is a correlation between c-command and movement: the structurally highest argument is the one that moves to an available subject position. This generalization has been captured under various theories o