Speakers: Ruth Brillman and Aron Hirsch
Title: Don’t move too close
Date/Time: Tuesday, Apr 1, 1-2p
Location: 32-D461
There are numerous cross-linguistic phenomena showing that extraction of subjects is more restricted than extraction of objects. Our focus will be on English: subjects show a that-trace effect, non-subjects do not; subjects cannot undergo tough-movement, non-subjects can; matrix subject wh questions do not in general license parasitic gaps, non-subject questions do; and so forth.
The range of subject/non-subject asymmetries may look disparate, but we argue that they can be accounted for in a unified way under a cross-linguistically operative spec-to-spec anti-locality constraint, (1), following Erlewine (2014).
(1) Movement of a phrase from the specifier of XP must cross a maximal projection other than XP. Movement from position α to β crosses γ if and only if γ dominates α but does not dominate β.
Anti-locality prohibits movement from spec-TP to spec-CP with TP complement to C. This in general rules out subject movement, except in particular circumstances, e.g. when there is an XP intervening between TP and CP, so TP is not complement to C and movement from spec-TP to spec-CP is thus not anti-local.
We look in detail at the English subject/non-subject asymmetries, and show that they follow from anti-locality, and neutralize in those circumstances where anti-locality permits subject movement.