Diagnosing covert A-movement
Maria Polinsky and Eric Potsdam
Harvard University and the University of Florida
Covert movement is movement that is not phonologically visible in the syntactic derivation. While covert A'-movement is widely proposed, covert A-movement is quite uncommon and difficult to identify. This chapter discusses diagnostics for covert A- movement and ways in which it can be distinguished from non-movement. We propose that covert A-movement is found in subject-to-subject raising in the Northwest Caucasian language Adyghe (Potsdam and Polinsky 2012). We compare the Adyghe construction with unaccusatives in Russian, which we show do not involve covert A-movement (contra Babyonyshev et al. 2001). We demonstrate that a range of mostly theory- independent phenomena can be used to determine whether covert A-movement occurs in a given construction, using Adyghe and Russian as contrasting test cases.
Keywords: covert movement, A-movement, subject-to-subject raising, unaccusatives, Adyghe (Circassian), Russian 2
Diagnosing covert A-movement
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1 Introduction
It is widely recognized that there are movements in the syntax that cannot be seen. We use the term COVERT MOVEMENT (Huang 1982; May 1985) to refer to such displacement operations in the grammar that have syntactic and semantic consequences but no visible phonological reflex. The exact modeling of covert movement is a matter of some debate, as it is intimately tied to the architecture of grammar (see Potsdam and Polinsky 2012 for discussion). The current Minimalist Y/T-Model of grammar (Chomsky 1995 and later work) assumes that at some point in the derivation, namely Spell Out, the derivation branches, continuing on to Phonological Form (PF) on one branch and to Logical Form (LF) on another branch.
(1) T/Y-Model (Chomsky 1995)