Speaker: Michelle Yuan (MIT) Title: Wh-movement to complement position in Kikuyu (and cross-linguistically) Date: Tuesday, March 8th Time: 1:00pm-2:00pm (the previously announced time was incorrect) Place: 32-D461
In Kikuyu (Northeast Bantu; Kenya), wh-questions are formed by moving a wh-word to the left periphery of any clause (matrix or embedded) or by leaving it in situ. In the cases of overt movement, the wh-word surfaces with a left-peripheral focus morpheme, which I take to occupy Foc in an articulated CP (Rizzi 1997). The main claim of this talk is that wh-movement in Kikuyu, triggered by an EPP property on Foc, lands in the complement of Foc, rather than in Spec-FocP (as is usually assumed); I’ll refer to this kind of movement as Undermerge, following Pesetsky (2007, 2013). Undermerging to complement position allows the focus morpheme, analyzed here as a focus operator (cf. Abels & Muriungi 2008), to directly take the wh-word as its semantic argument. I additionally demonstrate that this analysis accounts for some seemingly unrelated properties of Kikuyu such as the morphosyntactic behaviour of negation. This proposal for Kikuyu dovetails with previous work on association with focus via covert movement (Wagner 2006, Erlewine & Kotek 2014) and also lets us draw novel parallels with similar-looking phenomena from Turkish (Özyıldız 2015) and Navajo (Bogal-Allbritten 2013, 2014). Finally, I extend the Kikuyu facts to Cable’s (2007, 2010) Q theory of wh-movement/pied piping and show how this extension lets us explore the nature of the relationship between the Q particle and the higher interrogative C it forms a dependency with.