Subject movement behaviors

Ā-movement of subjects is cross-linguistically marked, requiring a difference in complementizer or verbal morphology. I put forward the hypothesis that many such quirks of subject extraction result from an anti-locality constraint on Ā-movement which blocks movement which is too short; specifically, subject movement from Spec,TP to Spec,CP is blocked, necessitating the use of an additional strategy for subject extraction.

At the same time, in part based on joint work with Kenyon Branan, I show that some movement processes appear to be restricted to subjects because the movement must attract the closest goal.

In 2017, I hosted a Workshop on Quirks of Subject Extraction and edited a special issue of Glossa on Subject Extraction.

Pied-piping and anti-pied-piping

Many previous theories have proposed covert movement for both syntactic and interpretational purposes. In cases of overt movement, we often observe pied-piping—additional material dislocated together with the logically attracted material. In joint work with Hadas Kotek, I argue that covert pied-piping does exist, based on the behavior of focus intervention effects in English wh-questions and focus association.

Kenyon Branan and I have identified a pattern of movement which can be logically described as the opposite of pied-piping: where focus movement (or focus particle placement) targets a subpart of the focus. We call this anti-pied-piping, and have identified instances of it in over 60 different languages from over 40 distinct language groups. We advance a new theory of particle placement — for both focus particles and Cable’s “Q particle” theory — which accounts for this behavior and unifies it with the better-studied pied-piping behavior.

Movement and linearization

By definition, movement constructions involve a change in word order. It may be unsurprising, then, that some constraints on movement may be best described in terms of their effects on word order.

The interpretation of movement (copy) chains

Movement also has consequences for interpretation. In particular, following the contemporary Copy Theory of movement, movement may formally result in multiple copies of a phrase within a single structure, which then must be modified for their interpretation. My work has served to strengthen the semantic motivation for the copy theory while also refining exactly how copy-chains must be interpreted at Logical Form.

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