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.

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.