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Rightward Movement: a Study in Locality University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Doctoral Dissertations Dissertations and Theses November 2015 Rightward Movement: A Study in Locality Jason Overfelt University of Massachusetts Amherst Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2 Part of the Syntax Commons Recommended Citation Overfelt, Jason, "Rightward Movement: A Study in Locality" (2015). Doctoral Dissertations. 538. https://doi.org/10.7275/7536511.0 https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/538 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Dissertations and Theses at ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. RIGHTWARD MOVEMENT: A STUDY IN LOCALITY A Dissertation Presented by JASON D. OVERFELT Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY September 2015 Department of Linguistics c Copyright by Jason D. Overfelt 2015 All Rights Reserved RIGHTWARD MOVEMENT: A STUDY IN LOCALITY A Dissertation Presented by JASON D. OVERFELT Approved as to style and content by: Kyle Johnson, Chair Rajesh Bhatt, Member Brian Dillon, Member Adrian Staub, Member John Kingston, Department Chair Department of Linguistics ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would first like to thank my committee: Kyle Johnson, Rajesh Bhatt, Brian Dillon, and Adrian Staub. They showed me what it looks like when linguistics is being done right. Kyle has earned a special thanks. There are no bounds to his patience and generosity. I know because I would have found them by now. Thank you to the rest of the faculty in the UMass Linguistics Department. I’m not sure I could have hoped for a more generous and dedicated team of mentors. Thank you to the UMass Psychology Department. While I didn’t spend much time over there, the things I learned have changed the way in which I approach linguistics. Thank you to my cohort at UMass. This proved to be a group of some the best people I know: Elizabeth, Minta, Seda, Claire, Presley, Robert, and Andrew. I apologize for all the requests for grammaticality judgments about parasitic gap constructions. Thank you to all the grad students in the UMass Linguistics Department who were there when I arrived and to the all the grad students who were there when I left. I learned so much from studying linguistics with these people. Thank you to those who offered their time to discuss the research presented here and elsewhere: Klaus Abels, Seth Cable, Emmanuel Chemla, Chuck Clifton, Vaneeta Dayal, Hamida Demirdache, Alex Drummond, Tom Ernst, Lyn Frazier, Jeremy Hartman, Vincent Homer, Tim Hunter, Gereon M¨uller, Eric Potsdam, Tom Roeper, Peggy Speas, Yasutada Sudo, Andrew Weir, the participants of the 36th Penn Linguistics Colloquium, the partic- ipants of WCCFL 32, the participants of NELS 45, and the participants of the LSA 2015, and the participants of the Tri-College Linguistics Lecture Series at Haverford College. Portions of this dissertation have or will appear in an altered form in Lingua 162, Lingua iv 164, and Linguistics Inquiry 47. Thank you to the anonymous reviewers of those articles for their extremely helpful comments and feedback. Any errors or misrepresentations of the ideas or comments of others are solely my responsibility. Thank you to the University of Massachusetts Graduate School for the Dissertation Improvement Grant that funded the experiments presented in chapters 2 and 4. I fear what my life would be like if it were not for Kathy Adamczyk, Karla Alfaro- Urias, Tom Maxfield, Michelle McBride, and Sarah Vega-Liros. I imagine that Tom, in particular, has dreamt what his life would be like if it were not for me. Thank you to the Tri-College Linguistics Department and the Haverford College com- munity for providing me with an academic home during the spring of 2015: Shizhe Huang, Brook Lillehaugen, and the students in my Spring 2015 classes. I feel very fortunate to have been given the amazing opportunity to be at Haverford. For providing me with an actual home, I extend a very warm thank you to Brook, Daniella, and Viola. I’m lucky to have the friendship of some really amazing people: Ricard and Alyson, Nate and Ellen, Heather and Rich, Amanda and Genti, Faune, and Tom. These people have provided me with both much needed support and a much needed escape. Thank you also to my families: my amazing parents Darren and Donna, Kara and Greg, Rick and Sherry, Trisha and Jerry, Nana and Papa Frank, and all the descendants thereof. The limitless love and encouragement of my parents is why I am here today. Finally, thank you to my wonderful wife Carly. There is no exaggeration when I say that none of this could have happened without her. v ABSTRACT RIGHTWARD MOVEMENT: A STUDY IN LOCALITY SEPTEMBER 2015 JASON D. OVERFELT B.A., PURDUE UNIVERSITY M.A., PURDUE UNIVERSITY Ph.D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Professor Kyle Johnson The irregular behavior of rightward movement presents a challenge to theories that treat such configurations as the direct product of the mechanism responsible for leftward movement. For example, rightward movement appears not to be subject to certain island constraints and famously appears to be subject to stricter locality conditions than leftward movement. This dissertation presents investigations of two particular instances of right- ward movement in English: Heavy-NP Shift (HNPS) and Extraposition from NP (EXNP). I argue that, by identifying the proper analyses for these phenomena, we can begin to at- tribute their apparent differences from leftward movement as the products of more general constraints on movement and properties of the particular mechanisms involved. Chapters 2 and 3 present a case study on HNPS. Chapter 2 argues, on the basis of par- asitic gap licensing, that there are instances of right DP-movement that are best modeled as the product of rightward linearized syntactic movement. I also present the results of vi an acceptability judgment study to address the argument by Postal (1994) that it is in fact Right Node Raising that generates what are only apparent parasitic gap. Chapter 3 builds on research conducted by Nissenbaum (2000). I argue that the need to bind a parasitic gap licenses potentially unbounded and successive-cyclic rightward movement beyond what is possible for standard HNPS. This suggests that the locality conditions on rightward move- ment are not categorically different that the locality conditions on leftward movement. I attribute the otherwise exceptional locality of standard HNPS to a constraint on economy of derivation (Chomsky 1993). Chapters 4 and 5 present a case study on EXNP. Chapter 4 proposes a novel connectiv- ity diagnostic that strongly suggests that an extraposed relative clause is generated inside its host DP (cf. Rochemont & Culicover 1990). The results of an acceptability judgment study suggest that an NPI that appears in a relative clause and is licensed by the universal quanti- fier every remains licensed in an EXNP configuration. I argue that the QR-based theory of EXNP from Fox & Nissenbaum (1999) best models the available data as well as some of the irregular properties of EXNP. Chapter 5 investigates the locality conditions on EXNP. I present evidence for a set of strong subclausal locality conditions on EXNP. However, we will see interpretive evidence that an extraposed relative clause can be interpreted outside of its containing clause. I suggest that these facts can be made to follow from a treatment of QR as an unbounded successive-cyclic instance of covert movement (e.g., Cecchetto 2004). The result is that both HNPS and the movement responsible for EXNP, are poten- tially unbounded and successive-cyclic movements, just like their leftward counterparts. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .................................................. iv ABSTRACT ................................................... ........... vi LIST OF TABLES ................................................... ...... xii LIST OF FIGURES ................................................... ... xiii CHAPTER 1. THE PROBLEM OF RIGHTWARD MOVEMENT ......................... 1 1.1 UnderstandingtheProblem ......................... ..................2 1.1.1 TypologicalRarity............................. ...............3 1.1.2 IllicitMovement ............................... ..............4 1.1.3 IslandViolations .............................. ...............5 1.1.4 ExceptionalLocality ........................... ...............6 1.2 ATheoryofSyntacticMovement ...................... ................7 1.3 TowardsaSolution: AnOverview ..................... ...............12 1.3.1 PartI:Heavy-NPShift ........................... ............13 1.3.1.1 Chapter2.................................... ......13 1.3.1.2 Chapter3.................................... ......14 1.3.2 PartII:ExtrapositionfromNP .................... .............15 1.3.2.1 Chapter4.................................... ......15 1.3.2.2 Chapter5.................................... ......16 2. MODELLING HEAVY-NP SHIFT ....................................... 17 2.1 TwoCompetingModelsofHeavy-NPShift............... ..............19 viii 2.1.1 TheRightward MovementApproach toHNPS ............ .......20 2.1.2 Leftward MovementApproaches toHNPS.............. .........22 2.1.2.1
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