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Share Paper 3814

Precedence-Sensitive A-Movement in Locative Inversion
Zachary Feldcamp
130-137 (complete paper or proceedings contents)

Abstract

The PP of locative inversion in English is known to exhibit certain properties characteristic of A-moved DP subjects, and others of A-bar-moved topics. Yet the syntactic locality profile of locative inversion has not been systematically investigated with regard to the A/A-bar distinction. This paper makes two empirical contributions towards this endeavor. First, I show that locative inversion exhibits A-movement locality in prohibiting PP subextraction from DP, in contrast with topicalization and other forms of A-bar-movement. Second, I provide novel data showing that DP must be linearized to the right of AdjP secondary predicates and other VP-internal material resistant to extraposition, corroborating the long-standing hypothesis that focus postposing is obligatory in LocInv. I propose that this condition is captured straightforwardly if movement always targets the leftmost potential goal. Ordinarily, DP precedes PP, so that DP raises; if DP undergoes rightward focus movement, however, PP precedes DP, so that PP raises.

Published in

Proceedings of the 42nd West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics
edited by Shweta Akolkar, Amber Galvano, Akil Ismael, Kang Franco Liu, and Line Mikkelsen
Table of contents
Printed edition: $475.00