Norvin Richards

Phase Edge and Extraction: A Tagalog Case Study

In this article, we examine evidence for the phase theory of movement (Chomsky 2000, 2001) in the context of Tagalog, arguing in particular that Tagalog has overt morphology that signals movement of arguments to checkan EPP-feature on the head of the vP phase. We show that this morphology interacts with extraction in ways Chomskys theory leads us to expect, and we develop a theory of the Tagalog facts that also accounts for the effects of Huangs (1982) Condition on Extraction Domain.

The Principle of Minimal Compliance

The syntactic literature discusses a number of phenomena in which a constraint that rules out a certain class of syntactic dependencies fails to rule out structures containing both an ill-formed dependency and a well-formed dependency; well-formed dependencies seem to be able to help dependencies that would be ill formed in isolation. In this article I attempt to provide a unified account of these phenomena. I postulate a principle that allows the computational system to ignore parts of a syntactic structure that have already been checked with respect to a particular constraint.

Another Look at Tagalog Subjects

There has been a fair amount of controversy over the right way of thinking about alternations like that shown in (1) (Tagalog), involving a phenomenon I will refer to as “topicalization”1: (1) a. Bumili ang lalaki ng bigas AT-bought T man G rice ‘The man bought rice.’ b. Binili ng lalaki ang bigas GT-bought A man T rice ‘A man bought the rice.’

Against Bans on Lowering

A number of syntactic theories posit explicit bans on lowering operations. Such bans are largely redundant on cyclic approaches to the syntactic derivation, which can rule out most instances of lowering without an explicit ban. I concentrate here on one instance of lowering not ruled out by the cycle, namely, an Agree relation between a probe and a goal in the probes own specifier. Facts about Bulgarian wh-movement suggest that operations of this kind are available in principle and that lowering therefore should not be banned.

Two Components of Long-Distance Extraction: Successive Cyclicity in Dinka

This article presents novel data from the Nilotic language Dinka, in which the syntax of successive-cyclic movement is remarkably transparent. We show that Dinka provides strong support for the view that long-distance extraction proceeds through the edge of every verb phrase and every clause on the path of movement (Chomsky 1986, 2000, 2001, 2008). In addition, long-distance dependencies in Dinka offer evidence that extraction from a CP requires agreement between v and the CP that is extracted from (Rackowski and Richards 2005, Den Dikken 2009b, 2012a,b). The claim that both of these components constrain long-distance movement is important, as much contemporary work on extraction incorporates only one of them. To accommodate this conclusion, we propose a modification of Rackowski and Richards 2005, in which both intermediate movement and Agree relations between phase heads are necessary steps in establishing a long-distance dependency.

An Island Effect in Japanese.

In this paper I develop an argument for a pied-piping approach to the apparent absence of island effects in Japanese, along the lines of Nishigauchi (1986, 1990). The argument (first mentioned in Watanabe (1992b), crediting Mamoru Saito) has to do with the behavior of multiple wh-phrases in situ which are in an island; such wh-phrases must all take the same scope. On a covert pied-piping approach to island effects, the ban on distinct scopes follows straightforwardly; the island must be pied-piped to a scope position by the wh-phrases inside it, establishing the scope position for all of them. I show that the ban on distinct-scope readings does exhibit several properties of islands, including additional-wh effects. I then go on to investigate briefly the nature of pied-piping, developing a theory which accounts for the fact that wh-islands cannot be pied-piped.

Nouns, verbs, and hidden structure in Tagalog

As Kaufman notes, the examples in (1) contain the same three words in di¤erent orders. Both aso ‘dog’ and nag-ingay ‘make noise’ appear to be capable of being either the subject or the predicate of the sentence. On one type of theory, the availability of the word orders in (1) constitutes evidence that Tagalog does not distinguish between as many kinds of lexical categories as English does, or perhaps that functional structure can select for more lexical categories in Tagalog than it can in English. On this kind of account, there are held to be no selectional di¤erences between nouns and verbs in Tagalog, perhaps because the distinction