Facilitator effects in middles and more
Name
990-19574-1-PB.pdf
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1.82 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
7f28fdcd14c3c7c31a99821b6994ce5c
Author(s)
Newman, Elise (Elise S.)
Date Issued
June 2020
Journal
Glossa
Publisher
Ubiquity Press, Ltd.
Citation
Newman, Elise. "Facilitator effects in middles and more." Glossa 5, 1 (June 2020): 62.
Abstract
In this paper, I will argue that obligatory adjuncts in many languages’ middle constructions are a byproduct of an independent constraint on movement, called Anti-locality (Abels 2003; Grohmann 2003; Bošković 2007; Schneider-Zioga 2007; Erlewine 2016; Brillman & Hirsch to appear). Anti-locality rules out movement that is too local; in other words, movement cannot produce a structure that is too similar to the pre-movement configuration. Though Anti-locality has typically been proposed for Ā-movement, one of its signatures is the presence of obligatory adjuncts (Erlewine 2016; Brillman & Hirsch to appear), which are also found in many languages’ middle constructions. I argue that the profile of obligatory adjuncts in middles is best understood if we extend Anti-locality to A-movement (Deal 2019), thus providing support for the unity of A- and Ā-movement. The proposal will include a tightly restricted set of assumptions about the structure and derivation of a middle, which combined with a formalized Anti-locality constraint, predicts the obligatory adjunct effects we find in different languages’ middle constructions. In particular, middles will be argued to lack a VoiceP and have a two step derivation, in which the object moves through Spec vP en route to subject position. Each movement step will be subject to Anti-locality, which can be ameliorated by adjuncts, reflexives, or lexical structure in the predicates that can form middles.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Linguistics and Philosophy
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.990
