Against Covert A-Movement in Russian Unaccusatives

IN RUSSIAN UNACCUSATIVES Eric Potsdam University of Florida Maria Polinsky Harvard University Franck, Julie, Glenda Lassi, Ulrich Frauenfelder, and Luigi Rizzi. 2006. Agreement and movement: A syntactic analysis of attraction. Cognition 101:173–216. Haiman, John, and Paola Benincà. 1992. The Rhaeto-Romance languages. London: Routledge. Hualde, José Ignacio. 1992. Metaphony and count/mass morphology in Asturian and Cantabrian dialects. In Theoretical analyses in Romance linguistics, ed. by Christiane Laeufer and Terrell A. Morgan, 99–114. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Prieto, Pilar. 2005. Syntactic and eurythmic constraints on phrasing decisions in Catalan. Studia Linguistica 59:194–222. Rasom, Sabrina. 2008. Lazy concord in the Central Ladin feminine plural DP: A case study on the interaction between morphosyntax and semantics. Doctoral dissertation, University of Padua. Available at http://paduaresearch.cab.unipd.it/268/1/t esiSabrinaRasom.pdf. Samek-Lodovici, Vieri. 2002. Agreement impoverishment under subject inversion: A crosslinguistic analysis. Linguistische Berichte 11:49–82. Truckenbrodt, Hubert. 1999. On the relation between syntactic phrases and phonological phrases. Linguistic Inquiry 30:219–255.


The argument for covert A-movement in Russian (Babyonyshev et al. 2001)
The A-movement that Babyonyshev et al. (2001) investigates is the movement of the internal argument of an unaccusative predicate to subject position. In English, the theme of an unaccusative predicate begins as an internal argument and moves overtly to the subject position, (1) (Perlmutter 1978, Pesetsky 1982, Burzio 1986, Levin and Rappaport Hovav 1995. In some languages, such as Italian, this movement is optional (Perlmutter 1983, Burzio 1986 and others). (1) [ TP snow [ VP melted snow]] Russian has several unaccusativity diagnostics (Chvany 1975, Pesetsky 1982, among them the Genitive of Negation (GN). GN is a phenomenon in which an underlying direct object may appear in the genitive case when licensed by negation. To illustrate, the genitive of the direct object in (2a) is impossible because there is no negation but, in the negative (2b), the accusative and the genitive alternate.
(2) a. ja uvidel ptic-u/*ptic-y 1SG saw bird-ACC/*bird-GEN 'I saw a/the bird.' (GN impossible) b. ja ne uvidel ptic-u/ptic-y 1SG not saw bird-ACC/bird-GEN 'I did not see a/any/the bird.' (GN possible) GN is impossible on subjects of transitive verbs, (3), and some intransitive verbs, (4), even in the presence of negation: (3) a. ni-kak-ie mal´čik-i ne polučili podarki On the surface, the GN is in the direct object position. At LF, the GN moves to the matrix subject position, spec,TP. We represent this covert movement using a crossed out copy in the higher position. The highest link in the chain is licensed as required by (6) by being m-commanded by negation.
The argument for covert A-movement comes from the following claim: When an unaccusative verb is embedded under a raising verb, the genitive theme argument of that verb can be licensed by matrix negation, but not by embedded negation: The GN in (8a) is licensed by matrix negation according to the licensing conditions in (6). Whether or not the GN moves to the matrix subject position, it will be m-commanded by the matrix negation. The ungrammaticality of (8b), in contrast, requires the following explanation: The GN undergoes covert A-movement to the matrix subject position yielding the LF in (9).

Evidence against covert A-movement in Russian
The main argument against the covert A-movement analysis is empirical. The crucial example, (8b), is unacceptable for independent reasons not related to the licensing of GN.
Structurally similar examples, with different lexical items, are fully acceptable. Three 6 further arguments against covert A-movement come from coordination, long-distance scrambling, and scope. 3

Graded judgments: semantic and pragmatic factors
Speakers' judgments on the crucial example, (8b), repeated as (10) (Comrie, 1976, Filip 1999, Partee and Borschev 2007. Turning now to the genitive, it differs from the cases it alternates with (the accusative and the nominative) in that it can denote a referent that is not at all or less affected by the event in question (Benigni 2006). This interpretation is more compatible with the general meaning of the imperfective (Pereltsvaig 1999 and references therein), and may be seen as conflicting with the perfective, which contributes to the reduced acceptability of the critical example.
The second relevant factor is the modality of the raising verb. Babyonyshev  'must' is often associated with a volitional agent or "performer", whereas subjects of unaccusatives are typically non-volitional (Dowty 1991, Levin and Rapaport Hovav 1995, Partee and Borschev 2007. This creates a semantic mismatch. There is no semantic conflict with the modal in (12), which does not have a bias towards volitionality, and the example become more acceptable.
If this explanation is on the right track, then we expect that the critical example will improve, even with the modal dolžno 'must', if we make the theme compatible with typical unaccusative semantics. One way to do this is to make the embedded theme inanimate. First, in such a case there is no possibility of interpreting the inanimate theme as a volitional entity bound by the obligation expressed by 'must'. Second, subjects of unaccusatives are more typically inanimate. (13)  verbs. This may contribute to their unacceptability but the source of that unacceptability is not syntactic.
If we look at the native speakers' judgments above, the judgments for the more acceptable examples hover around 4.0, still not reaching the higher end of the scale. We hypothesize that a final source for the reduced acceptability is word order. Although Russian word order is quite flexible, verb-initial orders are dispreferred outside of purely presentational structures (Babby 1975, 1980, Partee and Borschev 2002, 2007 The graded judgments can all be explained by taking into account semantics and information structure. The purely syntactic account is at best incomplete and at worst unnecessary since it cannot account for the variation. Given this conclusion, the crucial example in Babyonyshev et al.,(8b), does not provide an argument for covert A-movement. It is unacceptable due to the confluence of four non-syntactic factors: marked verb-initial word order, an animate theme with a modal biased towards volitionality, and a mismatch between the semantics of the perfective verb and the unmarked interpretation of the genitive of negation.

Coordination
Even if we accept the judgments given in Babyonyshev et al.,  would also be illicit because ATB movement must apply to the same constituent in both conjuncts (Ross 1967, Williams 1978, and others). Franks 1995 shows that morphological identity is in fact required in Russian ATB movement. Such movement would also target one landing site, spec,TP, with two distinct constituents. Bošković and Franks 2000 argues that covert ATB movement does not exist, which would independently rule out such a derivation.

Long-distance scrambling
A second argument comes from scrambling. Russian has long-distance scrambling of arguments and some adjuncts, typically in colloquial, spoken registers (Bailyn 2001, Testelets 2006, and others): scrambling is A' movement and that the subject-object asymmetry follows from the thattrace effect, which is independently attested in Russian.
If the GN theme of an unaccusative verb undergoes covert movement to the subject position, we expect that it should be barred from long-distance scrambling. There are two scenarios to consider: If the GN theme were to undergo early A-movement to spec,TP as part of the scrambling derivation, this would result in an illicit extraction from subject position, on par with (17) (Pesetsky 1982, Brown 1999, Pereltsvaig 1999, Harves 2002, Kagan 2007) but they do not simultaneously raise the GN above negation, either overtly or covertly.

Conclusions
Based on the categorical evidence from coordination, scrambling, and scope as well as on the graded judgments on the crucial supporting examples-which vary with word order, aspect, and animacy-we conclude that the proposal that Russian unaccusatives involve covert A-movement is incorrect. While covert A-movement may exist, it is not found in covert or overt, that explanation for the acquisition data will need to be rethought.