Covert partial &lt;i&gt;wh&lt;/i&gt;-movement and the nature of derivations

Kotek, Hadas

doi:10.5334/gjgl.49

Cited by 4 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…Accounting for facts such as (3) with covert movement requires a total rethink of what we know about islands, while an alternative which uses in-situ mechanisms avoids this problem. 1 In this article we argue that the (apparent) wide scope with necessity modals is not determined by syntactic movement, but rather by in-situ scoping mechanisms. The argument is of a similar tenor to the argument for wide scope indefinites, except our dataset is a comparative one.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 89%

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Modals, negation and movement: a reassessment

Jeretič

Thoms

2023

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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This article addresses the question of how root necessity modals are able to take scope over negative operators. Previous work has argued that wide scope readings are derived by syntactic movement of the modal over negation. We argue against this view. Reviewing facts from a number of different languages, we show that the availability of wide scope readings is not conditioned by the clause structure in which the modal is embedded, and we show that deriving the wide scope readings in the full range of configurations where they are found requires a number of complications for the movement rules involved. We discuss other issues for deriving the correct interpretations for modals in various negative constructions, and we outline an recent in-situ account of the modal facts (Jeretič 2021a) which avoids the complications that beset the syntactic account.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 89%

“…Cross-linguistically, many necessity modal auxiliaries like English must take apparent scope above sentential negation, even though they seem to originate below negation syntactically. (1) You must not leave.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Modals, negation and movement: a reassessment

Jeretič

Thoms

2023

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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“…Finally we return, with some hesitation the reasons for which will become clear in sections 5.3, 6.1 and footnote 32, to intervention effects. Kotek 2014Kotek , 2016 and Erlewine 2016 observe that Pesetsky's (2000) logic implies that an intervener along the path of covert wh-movement in superiority obeying structures can act as a probe for the locality of covert wh-movement, because covert phrasal wh-movement is not subject to intervention. The fact that the PL reading is absent just in case the intervener is in the higher clause points to the clause-boundedness of covert wh-movement.…”

Section: On Clause-boundednessmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the Syntax of Multiple Sluicing and What It Tells Us aboutWh-Scope Taking

Abels

Dayal

2023

Linguistic Inquiry

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Across many languages multiple sluicing obeys a clause-mate constraint. This can be understood on the empirically well-supported assumption that covert phrasal wh-movement is clause-bounded and subject to superiority. We provide independent evidence for syntactic structure at the ellipsis site and for locality constraints on movement operations within the ellipsis site. The fact that the distribution of multiple sluicing is substantially narrower than that of multiple wh-questions, on their single-pair as well as their pairlist reading, entails that there must be mechanisms for scoping in-situ wh-phrases that do not rely on covert phrasal wh-movement. We adopt the choice functional account for single-pair readings. For pair-list readings, we develop a novel functional analysis, argue for the functional basis of pair-list readings, and present a new perspective on pair-list readings of questions with quantifiers.

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“…In this case, for wh-in situ languages the SLD Principle would predict a sentence like (37) to be at least as difficult to process as (8b) because the wh-phrases would have to undergo QR-like LF-only movement. However, Kotek (2016) argues for a view in which in situ wh-phrases need not LF-move all the way to Spec,CP. Instead, they LF-move only as far as is needed for interpretive reasons-perhaps not at all in many cases (see Kotek & Hackl 2013 for experimental evidence in favor of this view).…”

Section: Case 4: Wh-movement Vs Cyclic Qrmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cyclic scope and processing difficulty in a Minimalist parser

Pasternak

Graf

2021

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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A common view in the theoretical literature is that quantifier raising (QR) is a clause-bounded operation. But in a paper published in Glossa, Wurmbrand (2018) argues that (i) QR is not clause-bounded, and the apparent clause-boundedness of QR is due to the human parser’s difficulty in processing extraclausal QR; and (ii) the relative difficulty of extraclausal QR depends on the size of the embedded clause from which QR takes place. She then proposes a theory of scope processing in which parsing Logical Form (LF) movement is costly for the human parser, which in conjunction with independently motivated assumptions about A′-movement generates the desired results. In this paper, we accept Wurmbrand’s descriptive observations and proposed syntax but offer an alternative, rigorously defined metric of scope processing difficulty that makes precise quantitative predictions. Our proposal is formalized with Minimalist Grammars (Stabler 1997) and expands recent work by Kobele et al. (2013), among others, that uses this formalism to account for numerous processing phenomena. Our metric correctly handles Wurmbrand’s observations as well as cases that are problematic for her account, and points the way toward an explanatory theory of scope processing.

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Covert partial <i>wh</i>-movement and the nature of derivations

Cited by 4 publications

References 26 publications

Modals, negation and movement: a reassessment

Modals, negation and movement: a reassessment

On the Syntax of Multiple Sluicing and What It Tells Us aboutWh-Scope Taking

Cyclic scope and processing difficulty in a Minimalist parser

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