Person:

Polinsky, Maria

This paper documents and analyzes an instance of covert A-movement, specifically covert subject-to-subject raising, in the Northwest Caucasian language Adyghe. We argue that Adyghe has a subject-to-subject raising construction in which the subject of an unaccusative verb’s complement clause undergoes A-movement into the matrix clause, but it does so covertly. We refer to this phenomenon as backward raising. True backward raising is distinguished from apparent cases that have similar agreement patterns but do not show any of the other evidence for movement found in the Adyghe construction. We illustrate the contrast between true and apparent backward raising by comparing Adyghe to Greek. The existence of backward raising helps to adjudicate between various theories of covert movement. It supports a theory in which covert movement involves actual phrasal movement. Covert movement cannot be reduced to a long-distance feature-matching relation such as Agree (Chomsky 2000). Linguistic theory thus needs to incorporate both mechanisms.

This paper presents and analyzes a biclausal construction in the Austronesian language Malagasy in which the subject of a complement clause is not expressed but is interpreted as coreferential with a higher noun phrase: Manantena Rabei [mba/fa hividy fiara Øi] 'Rabei hopes that Øi will buy a car.' We show that there are two different structures here depending upon the choice of complementizer. With the complementizer mba, the construction instantiates finite control: an obligatory referential dependency between an unexpressed subject in a finite clause and a higher antecedent. With the complementizer fa, despite some apparent similarities, the construction is not control. We propose instead an NP Drop analysis in which the missing subject is a null pronominal licensed by an independent process of topic drop.

The Indonesian verbs mau and ingin ‘want’ look like typical control verbs. When they are followed by a passive predicate however, an additional, unexpected interpretation arises. The sentence Siti mau/ingin di-cium oleh Ali means ‘Siti wants to be kissed by Ali’ but also ‘Ali wants to kiss Siti’. We call the latter interpretation Crossed Control (CC). In CC, the wanter is not the surface subject of ‘want’ but an oblique element in the complement clause and the surface subject is the theme of the embedded predicate and not an argument of ‘want’. For the syntax of CC, we reject clause union and backward control analyses and propose that ‘want’ in this construction is an auxiliary/raising verb that does not assign an external θ-role. We then propose that the control interpretation is encoded in the lexical semantics of the auxiliary. ‘Want’ takes a propositional argument but forces the volitional participant in this event to be construed as an experiencer of wanting. We hypothesize that this approach can be extended to volitional constructions in other languages.

This paper presents unusual patterns in raising and control and offers a syntactic account which would validate such patterns. On the empirical side, we present evidence for backward control (data from several languages), backward raising (in Adyghe), copy control (Zapotec, Assamese, Tongan) and copy raising (data from a number of languages). All the unusual cases of raising and control seem to involve an A-movement chain in which the lower, not the higher copy is pronounced, or both copies are spelled out. We also review some constructions which, while superficially resembling backward or copy structure, do not provide any evidence for a movement chain. On the theoretical side, assuming that the more unusual patterns are an empirical reality, linguistic theory should be capable of analyzing them. We present mechanisms from the current Minimalist Program which we believe allow the attested variation.

Covert movement is movement that is not phonologically visible in the syntactic derivation. While covert A'-movement is widely proposed, covert A-movement is quite uncommon and difficult to identify. This chapter discusses diagnostics for covert A-movement and ways in which it can be distinguished from non-movement. We propose that covert A-movement is found in subject-to-subject raising in the Northwest Caucasian language Adyghe (Potsdam and Polinsky 2012). We compare the Adyghe construction with unaccusatives in Russian, which we show do not involve covert A-movement (contra Babyonyshev et al. 2001). We demonstrate that a range of mostly theory independent phenomena can be used to determine whether covert A-movement occurs in a given construction, using Adyghe and Russian as contrasting test cases.

Few syntactic phenomena have attracted as much attention as Control: a structure in which the overt subject of a dominating clause (the controller) determines the referential properties of an unpronounced subject of its complement clause (the controllee). More than thirty years of research, starting with Rosenbaum 1967, Postal 1970, and Bresnan 1972, have produced several interesting theories of Control and Raising (for a good summary of approaches, see Davies and Dubinsky 2004). At the same time, most studies of Control have built heavily on the facts of English and a small number of other well-studied languages. The goal of this paper is to investigate Control in Malagasy, an Austronesian language spoken in Madagascar that is significantly different from English. We will present and analyze three Subject Control constructions in Malagasy which may provide an argument in favor of a syntactic analysis of Control as movement (Hornstein 1999, 2003). The paper is structured as follows. Section 2 introduces basic facts of Malagasy grammar. Section 3 briefly surveys the contrasting syntactic approaches of Control that we consider. Sections 4 through 7 describe and analyze three different patterns of Control in Malagasy, using two of the patterns to argue for the movement analysis. Section 8 summarizes the results of this work.