Branan, Kenyon and Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine, 2020. “Anti-pied-piping.”
Poster presented at LSA 94.

We discuss anti-pied-piping, where the constituent morphosyntactically treated as focused (MSF) is a proper subconstituent of the logical focus. (Cf. pied-piping, where a constituent that properly contains the focus (or wh) is MSF.) Anti-pied-piping is observed in many languages, but has not received significant previous attention. We show that anti-pied-piping is not entirely postsyntactic, as it feeds later movement, but it cross-linguistically displays a linear leftmost preference, characteristic of a PF phenomenon. We propose that focus particle placement takes place during cyclic Spell-Out (by phase), making (anti-)pied-piping sensitive to linearization but then feeding further syntactic operations.