Linguistic Variation - Volume 22, Issue 1, 2022

The paper reports the results of an in-depth crosslinguistic study of intervention effects and the grammar of alternatives in a typologically diverse sample of five languages: Palestinian Arabic (Afro-Asiatic, Semitic), Russian (Indo-European, Slavic), Samoan (Austronesian, Oceanic), Turkish (Altaic, Turkic), and Yoruba (Niger-Congo, Defoid). In all of these languages, we find an interesting asymmetry in that focus evaluation interrupts question evaluation and causes an intervention effect, but not vice versa. We take our data to inform the crosslinguistic analysis of two alternative-evaluating operators, the squiggle operator and the question operator. To capture the observed absence of variation, we propose two semantic universals: The squiggle operator unselectively evaluates all alternatives in its scope. The question operator, on the other hand, is selective.

According to Rizzi & Bocci’s (2017) suggested hierarchy of the left periphery, fronted foci (FOC) can never precede polarity complementizers (PolC); yet languages like Bulgarian and Macedonian appear to display precisely such an ordering configuration. On the basis of a cross-linguistic comparison of ten Slavic languages, I argue that in the Slavic subgroup the possibility of having a focus precede PolC is dependent on the morphological properties of the complementizer itself: in languages where the order FOC < PolC is acceptable, PolC is a complex morpheme derived through the incorporation of a lower functional head with a higher one. The order FOC < PolC is then derived by giving overt spell-out to the intermediate copy of PolC rather than to the topmost one. In turn, this option is linked to the possibility, recorded in all languages which allow for FOC < PolC, to also realize the morpheme expressing interrogative polarity as an enclitic particle attaching to fronted foci.

Extraction and subextraction tend to receive separate attention in syntax, which leads to the assumption that they should be analyzed independently, even though they both illustrate an asymmetry between subjects and objects. By looking at various phenomena in English, German, Spanish and Norwegian I propose that this parallel behavior is not accidental, but that there is a previously unnoticed generalization: subextraction is allowed iff extraction is possible and the target of subextraction is not an indirect object. I propose that a revised version of Spec-to-Spec antilocality (Erlewine 2016) is necessary: movement of and out of an XP must cross a Projection Line (PL) (Brody 1998), i.e. the set of all projections of a head. This version of antilocality can derive Freezing effects, Huang’s (1982) CED, and their exceptions; and Comp-trace effects and their neutralization, extending them to subextraction. However, antilocality on its own cannot derive the extraction-subextraction asymmetry in indirect objects. I propose that the Principle of Minimal Compliance (PMC) (Richards 1998) can suspend antilocality if agree between a probe and a goal has happened. The version adopted here will allow extraction of the whole XP, but disallow extraction of its specifier due to the lack of an agree relation. Antilocality and the PMC combined also make the right predictions in other domains such as the lack of do-support in matrix subject questions and A-movement of the subject in declarative clauses, providing evidence that antilocality is a constraint that should apply to (at least) both A and A′-movement.