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Marjorie Pak
361-369 (complete pdf)
Luganda, like a number of other Bantu languages, has strict S-V-IO-DO word order in the active but two possible word orders in the passive (IO-V-DO alongside the 'theme passive' DO-V-IO). The author presents new data showing that, despite their apparent unboundedness, Luganda theme-passives allow movement across at most one intervener -- suggesting that traditional assumptions about A-movement locality (e.g. shortest-move, relativized minimality) should not be abandoned entirely. Recent alternative treatments posit EPP-driven movement to an outer specifier across an inner specifier, sometimes called 'leap-frogging' (McGinnis 2004, Doggett 2004, etc.). The author examines the contextual restrictions on leap-frogging and show that it is also implicated in single-object structures with overt external arguments in Luganda. The idea is that the external argument in a Luganda passive is in the position where it was originally merged -- Spec,vP -- rather than being a PP adjunct; leap-frogging then allows the next-lower argument to skip over the external argument. Crucially, each step of movement involved in these derivations obeys shortest move, and the idea that A-movement is cross-linguistically blocked by intervening arguments can accordingly be maintained. Implications for feature-inheritance and phonological spellout are explored here as well.
Published in:
Proceedings of the 27th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics
edited by Natasha Abner and Jason Bishop
Table of contents
ISBN 978-1-57473-428-7 library binding
vii+466 pages
publication date: 2008
published by Cascadilla Proceedings Project, Somerville, MA, USA