Diagnosing Covert A-Movement

Abstract

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.