Person:

Szczegielniak, Adam

This paper examines verbal clitics in Polish and Slovak

In this paper I will argue that Polish auxiliary clitics provide additional evidence for adopting Rizzi’s (1997) expanded structure of the Left Periphery (LP) by arguing that auxiliary clitics are a phonological manifestation of the morphological properties of the Fin head. This will be supported by examples of auxiliary clitics demarcating Focus/Topic constructions from material within IP. Further support will come from examples where auxiliary clitics interact with LF operations like reconstruction and reflexive interpretation. However, I will also show that syntactic operations over-generate possible outputs and that we need to postulate a phonological buffer which filters syntactic output.

In this paper the author claims on the basis of Polish data that: (1) Sluicing does not alleviate islands, just like VP ellipsis; (2) Ellipsis is not licensed by syntactic identity (no PF, LF Islands, or trace deletion); (3) There is syntactic structure in the ellipsis site; (4) ellipsis is licensed by a recoverability condition--if there is enough information in the non-elided signal, ellipsis is acceptable, including case-mismatches, PP stranding violations, adjunct islands, etc.

This work address the puzzle why VP ellipsis where the subject plus an auxiliary/modal/negation (non bare-VP ellipsis) is not possible in relatives derived via operator movement, whereas VP ellipsis where only the subject remains (bare-VP ellipsis) is possible in both relatives derived via operator movement as well as head noun movement. I will argue that Polish and Russian ellipsis data points to the generalization that VPellipsis is essentially deletion of a topic VP. In the first part of the thesis, I show that Polish and Russian relative clauses divide into two types: (i) derived by head noun movement (co/cto-relatives), and (ii) derived by operator movement and adjunction of the relative to the head noun (który/kotoryjrelatives). In the second part, I answer why bare-VP ellipsis is only possible in co/cto-relatives, and non bare-VP ellipsis is possible in both types of relatives. I will argue that de-stressing and subsequent ellipsis requires the establishment of Topic and Focus in overt syntax. The establishment of Topic/Focus interacts with relative clause formation giving rise to the asymmetry in the availability of both types of VP ellipsis in different kinds of relative clauses.

This paper supports the model where VP ellipsis is licensed via de-stressing which in turn is licensed via Focus closure (Rooth 1992). However, it is also argued that we have to assume that ellipsis is preceded by the establishment of Focus/Topic relations in overt syntax. This can be done in two ways: by focusing the subject, provided a Σ head is in the numeration, or by topicalizing the VP. The first strategy gives rise to non bare-VP ellipsis, the second to bare-VP ellipsis.

The paper proposes that degree/amount relative clauses are derived via overt Degree Phrase raising out of the CP. I show that there exist two distinct types of degree relative clauses whose properties can be deduced from the differences between the two types of DegP argued to be present in the grammar by Neelman, van de Koot & Doetjes (2004). This raises the possibility that syntactic and semantic variation between classes of relative constructions can be reduced to the type of lexical item that is raised out of the CP.

In current Minimalism Move/Attract is considered to be a Last Resort operation driven by the need to eliminate features unreadable at the PF or LF interfaces (see, e.g., Chomsky 1995). Crucially, if elements move because they are forced to, then there should be no language exhibiting a structure with the same Numeration and yet with different linear orders.1 Consequently, optional movement poses a problem for current Minimalism. In this paper I will discuss certain properties of various word orders in Polish and will attempt to propose a minimalist account of Polish optional movement. As a starting point, I will assume the minimalist framework proposed in Chomsky (1995, Chap.4) and later modified in his MIT 1997 lectures.