English Studies

This dissertation concentrates on movement dependencies under minimalist assumptions and suggests that the opposite of moving too far (standard locality) exists also, namely moving too closely: anti-locality. A theory of anti-locality will be developed that incorporates a tripartition of clause structure into Prolific Domains, areas of the clause that share a common "super-feature" or context value. The lowest Prolific Domain is responsible for thematic relations (θ-domain), the next one for agreement relations (φdomain), and the highest one for discourse relations (ω-domain). Under this approach, anti-locality is expressed in terms of the Condition on Domain Exclusivity which simply bans Domain-internal movement. This ban is motivated on grounds of PF-legibility, much as deleting lower copies is driven by PF-requirements.

Multiple interrogatives in German involve highly thematic Wh-elements. This is captured by the notion of "Discourse-Restricted Quantification" (DRQ): discourse restrictions in German (and possibly other languages, though not English) force both Wh-elements in double questions (Multiple Wh) to move to a syntactically thematic position which is assumed to be a functional projection in an articulated CPstructure; this projection is Top(ic)P. This movement is motivated by an underlyingly complex structure assigned to the elements which in turn has overt realizations that can be found in (interrogative) partitives. The movement is instantiated similarly to pre-subject scrambling, independently taken to be topicalization. The higher Wh-topic then moves to CP in order to check the Wh-feature; the other Wh checks its Wh-feature covertly. Evidence from a number of languages shows interesting correlations of Wh-movement and Topicalization supporting this proposal. Semantically, the scope of multiple Whphrases in German is subject to DRQ: the sets of referents for both Wh-elements are limited in that they must be known to speaker and hearer. The differences between German and English will be addressed and there is also plenty of cross-linguistic discussion. A wide range of phenomena are scrutinized here, including (but not exclusively) Wh-adjuncts, Wh-islands and child language. The upshot is that a conception of Wh-topics is not only more natural than one would think at first but also superior to any other account presently made public in the minimalist literature.

German has two types of left dislocation (LD), commonly referred to as Contrastive Left Dislocation (CLD) and Hanging Topic Left Dislocation (HTLD). 1 Independent of a syntactic framework, the following should show conclusively that the two are different in their syntactic nature; leaving aside framework-specific metaphors for displacement, it further suggests that CLD must be derived by movement of the LDed XP, while HTLD is not. In particular, I propose that the specific resumptive pronoun (RP) found in CLD is the spelled out copy of the LDed XP itself; spelling out of copies is needed as a repair strategy for an otherwise illegitimate movement. As such, LD structures across languages should be split into two types, whether they are derived by movement or whether they are base-generated. In this paper, I lay out the main properties in which CLD and HTLD differ; I also present a view on clause structure that incorporates spelling out of copies, suggesting Copy Left Dislocation as a more appropriate term for CLD. Lastly, I point to possible future avenues for the general picture developed.

Prosodically reduced pronouns come in two forms, "weak" and "clitic," both differing from non-reduced "strong" pronouns. Both of these also occur in Westgermanic dialects and exhibit different properties which cannot always be unambiguously disentangled. The theoretical framework presented here allows us a straightforward disambiguation: reduced pronominal elements in the left periphery must be clitics, while those below cannot. The functional head F 0 , encoding "point-of-view," serves as the licensing position for clitics which are here taken to be heads; weak pronouns, maximal phrases in the overt syntax, cliticize at LF. Movement to F 0 is driven by the need to compensate for underspecified φ-feature information.

Locality effects are typically understood to ensue when a dependency between two positions is too long, that is, as an upper bound on the distance an element may move (Standard Locality). This article explores some consequences of asking whether the opposite effect exists also, in terms of the Anti-Locality Hypothesis: movement must be local, but not too local. Anti-Locality is formulated through a tripartite split of clause structure into Prolific Domains, sub-domains of the derivation relevant for the operation Spell Out. The focus of the investigation will be generalized successive-cyclic movement: clause-internal movement from thematic to A-to A'-positions as well as movement across clause boundaries, thereby unifying the derivational steps involved in unrelated constructions. I argue that within a clause, an element can only ever move to the next higher Prolific Domain (Intra-Clausal Movement Generalization), while movement across clauses targets a position within the next higher Prolific Domain of the same type (Inter-Clausal Movement Generalization). These two generalizations are claimed to boil down to an interaction between Standard and Anti-Locality considerations. Consequently, we can observe a transparent symmetry in locality issues, which I take to be a desirable result.

Investigating Root Infinitive constructions (RIs) in the adult grammar, we concentrate on a comparative view between English and Spanish. Through a careful study of the syntactic and semantic properties of RIs, and their cross-linguistic differences, we present strong arguments for the internal structure of RIs that we propose: English RIs are deficient TPs, while Spanish RIs have an additional Comp-related functional projection FP on top. This structural difference accounts for the syntactic similarities and differences in RIs in the two languages. On the semantic side, we propose that RIs are indefinite descriptions of events. RIs crucially involve two related terms, the RI itself (John read this book?!) and the Coda (That's impossible!), where the relating predicate is an exclamative operator with scalar properties akin to the focus particle even. We show that the RI, the exclamative operator and the Coda form a tripartite structure both syntactically and semantically, in the sense of other standard analyses of quantificational constructions. Differences in temporal interpretation are shown t o derive from the existence of the tripartite structure and the (un)availability of infinitival verb movement.

Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today (LA) provides a platform for original monograph studies into synchronic and diachronic linguistics. Studies in LA confront empirical and theoretical problems as these are currently discussed in syntax, semantics, morphology, phonology, and systematic pragmatics with the aim to establish robust empirical generalizations within a universalistic perspective.

This squib sets its task to be an investigation into conditions on movement. In particular, recent work within the Minimalist Program will be adopted and combined with some proposals regarding word order phenomena in German in order to take a fresh look at the phenomenon of Superiority (Chomsky 1973) and the lack thereof in German. The thesis of the present work is to discuss the possibility of an interaction between movement that results in (free) word orders in German, known as scrambling, and movement processes involved in question formation, i.e.

Left dislocation constructions seem to come in very different shapes with very different properties across languages. We concentrate on the shapes occurring in Germanic and argue for a unified movement analysis which distinguishes contrastive left dislocation from hanging topic left dislocation in that only the former involves Agree on top of Match between the left dislocate and the resuming pronominal. Under such an approach, the variety in shapes and properties observed breaks down to a tight similarity from which the diverging patterns fall out in a straightforward fashion.

We will see how it is reasonable to speak of a minimum distance that an element must cross in order to enter into a well-formed movement dependency. In the course of the discussion of this notion of "anti-locality," a theoretical framework unfolds which is compatible with recent thoughts on syntactic computation regarding local economy and phrase structure, as well as the view that certain pronouns are grammatical formatives, rather than fully lexical expressions. The upshot will be that if an element does not move a certain distance, the derivation crashes at PF-unless the lower copy is spelled out (as a pronominal element). The framework presented has a number of implications for the study of clause-typing, of which some will be discussed towards the end.

This paper provides supporting evidence for a number of hypotheses made in recent models of derivational syntax. The phenomenon under study is shm-reduplication in English, a particular instance of the more general, cross-linguistic pattern of echo reduplication. It is argued that the two elements in a reduplicated structure form a chain of two left-peripheral positions that, due to a distinctness requirement within a Spell-Out unit for the Transfer to PF, cannot be mapped onto linear order. A number of seemingly unrelated facts are derived rather naturally: (i) English shmreduplication cannot appear in an argument position; (ii) the two copies involved in shmreduplication are strictly adjacent; (iii) the phonological phrasing of the two copies is not the intonation of a compound; (iv) the discourse context felicitating shm-reduplication is not out-ofthe-blue; (v) no echo reduplication process yields the reverse order (e.g., with the echo reduplicant preceding the base); and (vi) echo reduplication is never the exponent of a Case-or wh-feature.