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The goal of this article is to understand the syntax of Icelandic indirect causatives (ICs), especially with respect to the implicit causee. We show that the complement of the causative verb must be at least as large as a VoiceP, and that it shares some properties with active VoicePs and others with passive VoicePs. We make sense of this state of affairs by proposing that the causee, while phonetically silent, has an explicit syntactic representation, but as a φP rather than a DP. We further propose that ICs are built by stacking a second VoiceP on top of the lexical verb’s first VoiceP, and that this configuration, along with the underspecified interpretation of φP, leads to a special thematic interpretation of both the causer and the implicit causee. Our analysis suggests that there are certain core ingredients involved in building ICs—such as stacked VoicePs and an underspecified causee—but that the source of these ingredients can vary across languages and constructions, depending on the formal primitives that grammars make available to the languages more generally.

This squib discusses environments in which a subject bears ergative case in the absence of an absolutive object, contrasting syntactically ergative languages (e.g., Q’anjob’al) with languages in which the ergative argument cannot be targeted for φ-agreement (e.g., Hindi-Urdu). In these environments, the parallels between Ā-movement and verb agreement with respect to the morphological accessibility hierarchy (Bobaljik 2008, Deal 2016) break down: in the absence of an absolutive object, syntactically ergative languages allow for extraction of the ergative argument, but in absolutive-only φ-agreement languages, agreement never targets the ergative argument.

It has been debated in phonological literature whether word stress should be modeled using metrical grids or feet and how its directionality is assigned. In this article, we discuss new data from Ukrainian, which has a hybrid metrical system with unpredictable lexical stress and grammatical iterative secondary stress. We demonstrate that Ukrainian poses a challenge for current metrical theories relying on gradient alignment and propose an analysis based on categorical alignment coupled with a rhythmic licensing constraint mandating that lapses are located near the main stress (LAPSE-AT-PEAK). We argue that LAPSE-AT-PEAK is required regardless of the stress representations (feet or grids) assumed.

Evidence from the Lithuanian active existential construction shows that Lithuanian has a type of VoiceP that assigns structural accusative case in the absence of a syntactically projected implicit argument in Spec,VoiceP. This construction violates Burzio’s (1986) Generalization and its later versions (e.g., Marantz 1991, Kratzer 1994, 1996, Woolford 2003, McFadden 2004, Legate 2014). This article offers a revised version of Burzio’s Generalization by proposing that while accusative case must be assigned by a thematic Voice, the assignment of accusative case by Voice may vary independently from the selection of a specifier.

Noun phrases, such as this photo, can often appear both with modifiers, such as the adjective old, and with arguments, typically PPs such as of the queen. Most of the literature on the syntax of DPs has adopted the hypothesis that adjectives are base-generated higher than nominal arguments, just as adverbs are merged higher than arguments in the clause. This squib looks at the syntax of the Italian DP, focusing on the distribution of modifier PPs and argument PPs, and offers novel evidence that, contrary to the received view, nominal modifiers such as adjectives are in fact base-generated lower than nominal arguments.

Pronominal paradigms in Philippine-type Austronesian languages show a robust and curious gap: in transitive clauses, pivot arguments and nonpivot agents may have bound pronominal forms, appearing as second-position clitics, but pronominal nonpivot themes must be full, free pronouns. This gap is instructive regarding the orga-nization of the lower phase edge. As cliticization involves a syntactic dependency between the host and argument position and all syntactic dependencies are constrained by phases, the gap is explained if pivots and nonpivot agents are specifiers of the phase head, making them the only DPs accessible for operations from outside of the lower phase.

Null object (NO) constructions in Korean and Japanese have received different accounts: as (a) argument ellipsis ( Oku 1998 , S. Kim 1999 , Saito 2007 , Sakamoto 2015 ), (b) VP-ellipsis after verb raising ( Otani and Whitman 1991 , Funakoshi 2016 ), or (c) instances of base-generated pro ( Park 1997 , Hoji 1998 , 2003 ). We report results from two experiments supporting the argument ellipsis analysis for Korean. Experiment 1 builds on K.-M. Kim and Han’s (2016) finding of interspeaker variation in whether the pronoun ku can be bound by a quantifier. Results showed that a speaker’s acceptance of quantifier-bound ku positively correlates with acceptance of sloppy readings in NO sentences. We argue that an ellipsis account, in which the NO site contains internal structure hosting the pronoun, accounts for this correlation. Experiment 2, testing the recovery of adverbials in NO sentences, showed that only the object (not the adverb) can be recovered in the NO site, excluding the possibility of VP-ellipsis. Taken together, our findings suggest that NOs result from argument ellipsis in Korean.

An increasingly popular analysis of object gap sentences in many languages derives them in two steps: (a) V-raising out of VP, and (b) VP-ellipsis of the remnant, stranding the verb (V-stranding VP-ellipsis, VSVPE). For Hebrew, Hindi, Russian, and Portuguese, I show this analysis to be inadequate. First, it undergenerates elliptical objects in various environments, and second, it overgenerates nonexisting adjunct-including readings. For all the problematic data, simple argument ellipsis provides a unified explanation. The absence of VSVPE in languages that do allow V-raising and Aux-stranding VP-ellipsis raises an intriguing problem for theories addressing the interaction of head movement and ellipsis.

This article puts forward two distinct arguments regarding the condition on identity between antecedent and ellipsis site that governs the grammaticality of sluices. The first argument is that the viability of a requirement of syntactic identity has been too hastily dismissed. Such a condition is viable if syntactic identity is not assessed over the entire deleted constituent, but instead is assessed head-by-head for each head stranded in the ellipsis site. This allows syntactic differences associated with material that has moved out of the ellipsis site to not affect the calculation of syntactic identity. The second argument is that the bestiary of possible mismatches under sluicing can be given a uniform syntactic characterization: all and only material originating outside of the verbal complex can be mismatched under sluicing. The restriction of identity conditions to the verbal complex is implementable in many (but not all) approaches to ellipsis identity; I provide a concrete application of it to the proposed head-based syntactic identity condition.

In this article, I argue for an ellipsis analysis of Japanese null arguments on the basis of a novel observation that covert extraction (i.e., extraction that does not affect word order) is possible out of them. Specifically, assuming that the extraction possibility is a diagnostic for surface anaphora/ellipsis, I claim that the covert extraction possibility indicates that Japanese null arguments can be elliptic: they cannot be uniformly silent deep anaphora/proforms. Furthermore, I show that there is an overt/covert extraction asymmetry in that only covert extraction is allowed out of Japanese null arguments. I argue that the LF copy analysis of argument ellipsis provides a solution for the overt/covert extraction asymmetry. The discussion also has consequences for the proper analysis of several phenomena of Japanese syntax, including wh-in-situ.

This article defends a semantic identity account of ellipsis licensing. The argument comes from examples of multiple sluicing, especially from Russian. Concentrating on antecedents that contain two quantified statements, we uncover a surprising asymmetry: surface scope antecedents can license a multiple sluice, but inverse scope antecedents cannot. We explain this finding in terms of semantic accounts of ellipsis licensing, where ellipsis is licensed when the sluice corresponds to an (implicit) question under discussion. We show that QUDs cannot be computed from the truth-conditional content of the antecedents alone; instead, they must be computed only after (scalar) implicatures have been calculated and added to the common ground, along with the context of utterance. We further discuss the commitments required of syntactic/LF identity accounts of ellipsis licensing in order to accommodate multiple sluicing with quantified antecedents, and argue that such accounts are practically untenable.

Some syntactic approaches to argument structure posit small clause constituents to represent what they take to be the semantics of the constructions being analyzed. For example, this approach would analyze a resultative construction like Martha hammered the metal flat as containing a small clause [the metal flat]. In the small clause analysis, the NP the metal is only an argument of the result state denoted by the small clause, and its referent is not part of the causal hammering event. Depictive secondary predicates show that this analysis is incorrect; the NP referent must be part of the verbal causing event. I show this for several constructions that have been analyzed as small clauses: resultatives, caused-motion constructions, verb-particle constructions, and double object constructions, among others. I also revisit arguments that have been presented in favor of small clause analyses (e.g., the argument from adverbial modification) and show that they do not actually favor small clause analyses. Domains of anaphora, in contrast, converge with depictives as a reliable diagnostic for small clauses, as actual small clauses always constitute opaque domains for anaphora.

In Wood 2012 , I argued that object extraposition of infinitive clauses in Icelandic reveals a problem for the movement theory of control (MTC). Object extraposition involves a pronoun that, when present, prevents any movement out of the extraposed clause, but allows the control dependency. Drummond and Hornstein (2014) claim that the facts discussed in Wood 2012 are compatible with the MTC. In this reply, I show that their response is based on a misunderstanding of how Icelandic object extraposition works and that the problem observed in Wood 2012 remains. I also present a novel argument against the MTC by showing that Drummond and Hornstein’s account of ‘promise’ - type verbs cannot be extended to Icelandic.

In this squib, we provide novel empirical support for treating the thematic domain—the vP—as a locality domain like CP (a phase), in agreement with a growing body of research (see Fox 1999 , Barbiers 2002 , Legate 2003 , Rackowski and Richards 2005 , Cozier 2006 , Kahnemuyipour and Megerdoomian 2011 , Buell 2012 , Van Urk and Richards 2015 ; see Den Dikken 2006 for an opposing view). We show how vP phasehood solves a previously unsolved problem for defining the locality of Icelandic Stylistic Fronting. We present novel data to show that Stylistic Fronting of verbs and particles can only cross one phase boundary, a generalization that is empirically superior to clause-boundedness. Our study supports the view that v defines a phase edge whether the verb is linked to an external argument or not ( Legate 2003 , Marantz 2007 ).

The article argues that in constructions where there is more than one phrase at a phasal edge, only the highest edge is available for movement and anaphor binding. This shows that only the outermost edge counts as the edge of a phase for the Phase Impenetrability Condition ( PIC). The article also demonstrates that moving the element that counts as the phasal edge in multiple specifier/adjunct cases can affect the PIC status of the remaining edges. These conclusions provide a new argument for the contextuality of phasehood. A number of recent works have argued that the phasal status of a phrase can be affected by the syntactic context in which it occurs. This article goes one step further: it shows that the concept of phasal edge, more precisely the status of a specifier/adjunct regarding the PIC, can also be affected by the syntactic context in which the specifier/adjunct occurs. The article also discusses several issues regarding the syntax and semantics of adjectives, possessors, and demonstratives, including what Partee (2006) calls familiar demonstratives, as well as anaphor binding.

This squib discusses a problem that arises when a standard degree-based semantics for intensifiers is combined with a second-order contextualist semantics for the predicate average on its concrete reading. In a nutshell, the combination requires that the argument of totally average be simultaneously average in every respect and not average at all in one particular respect. This problem is claimed to arise from allowing (in a sense) the denotation of average to refer to itself; the problem is then solved by prohibiting (by a combination of semantic and pragmatic means) self-reference at the lexical level.

Ergative case is said to mark transitive subjects, and it is widely assumed that this is true under the ordinary definition of transitive; however, Bittner and Hale (1996) propose that ergative languages fall into two types, neither of which is based on the ordinary notion of transitivity. In one, a direct object is not necessary for ergative case: any verb with an external argument counts as transitive, following Hale and Keyser 1993 (e.g., Warlpiri). In the other, a direct object is necessary, but not sufficient: the subject gets ergative case only if the object moves out of the VP (e.g., Inuit). This article argues that Niuean, Dyirbal, and Nez Perce are also of this object shift type. A search yielded no language where ergative case is clearly governed only by ordinary transitivity; languages that do fit the stereotype have only ergative agreement. A formal account of the correlation between object shift and ergative case is proposed, under which ergative case can be used as a ‘‘last resort,’’ as one of three ways to avoid the locality violation that object shift creates.

This article challenges the empirical generalization that the possessed element in the Hebrew possessive dative (PD) construction cannot be an external argument ( Borer and Grodzinsky 1986 ), a generalization that has been leveraged in the use of the PD construction as an unaccusativity diagnostic. An acceptability judgment experiment shows that the PD construction is dispreferred when the possessor is less prominent than the possessee on the animacy or definiteness scale; however, it shows no effect of unaccusativity, raising serious doubts regarding the construction’s validity as an unaccusativity diagnostic.

Various authors have recently endorsed Harmonic Grammar (HG) as a replacement for Optimality Theory (OT). One argument for this move is that OT seems not to have close correspondents within machine learning while HG allows methods and results from machine learning to be imported into computational phonology. Here, I prove that this argument in favor of HG and against OT is wrong. In fact, I show that any algorithm for HG can be turned into an algorithm for OT. Hence, HG has no computational advantages over OT. This result allows tools from machine learning to be systematically adapted to OT. As an illustration of this new toolkit for computational OT, I prove convergence for a slight variant of Boersma’s (1998) (nonstochastic) Gradual Learning Algorithm.

Contrary to recent work in Distributed Morphology adopting Early Root Insertion (the notion that Roots are present from the outset of the syntactic derivation), we argue that Late Insertion applies to Roots just like other morphemes. We support this conclusion with empirical evidence (Root suppletion and hyponymous direct objects in noun incorporation and related constructions) and conceptual considerations (including the beneficial obviation of readjustment operations and the possibility that narrow syntax is universal). Additional data (Latin semideponent verbs) allow us to recast Embick’s (2000) licensing analysis of Latin deponent verbs as a further argument for Late Root Insertion.

This remark argues for the Case-theoretic concept of Case as a syntactic licensing requirement of DPs related to their case morphology, against alternatives where DPs need no syntactic licensing, or where their case morphology is unrelated to it. The argument is made from constraints on combining exceptional Case marking (ECM) and the double object construction, where there is a single object Agree/Case locus for two DPs. The mechanisms and nature of Case are briefly examined. The appendix sketches an extension to wager-class ECM.

Research on sluicing has not yet reached consensus on whether the identity condition on this ellipsis construction is syntactic or semantic. Evidence from Chamorro and English is presented that over and above semantic identity, sluicing requires limited syntactic identity. The limited syntactic identity condition involves argument structure on the one hand and abstract Case on the other. This approach is shown to account for a range of novel and familiar sluicing patterns in the two languages. It also provides new evidence for the idea that the Chamorro antipassive is an implicit argument construction.

We argue that English allows both rightward-descending VP shell structures and more traditional rightward-ascending VPs. The choice between these depends on case theory and economy. Case theory triggers VP shell formation whenever the verb is merged with a DP object after it has been merged with some other category. The reason is that VP shell formation allows verb and object to surface in adjacent positions, a prerequisite for case licensing in English. Economy has the effect that in all other circumstances, VP shell formation is blocked. Our argument is based on a range of intricate data, many of which involve the distribution of object-oriented floating quantifiers. We end with a discussion of the binding data that are often taken to support a uniformly descending structure—incorrectly, in our view.

This article presents an argument from ellipsis parallelism that traces of all types of movement receive a bound variable interpretation at LF. MaxElide, a constraint on ellipsis, is used to probe the size of parallelism domains and detect the semantic contribution of a variety of traces. The data examined reveal a detailed interaction between wh-movement from various positions, T-to-C movement, and movement of subjects. I offer an analysis based on the overlapping variable-binder relationships created by these movements. The theoretical conclusion is that Ā-, A-, and head movement all produce traces that feed interpretation. This conclusion argues directly against several proposals that deprive non-Ā movements of (certain) semantic effects—for example, proposals that head movement occurs at PF, or that A-movement does not leave traces.

1. Neeleman and Szendroi‟s (2007) Radical-Pro-Drop Generalization Neeleman and Szendroi (2007) (N&S) propose that Radical Pro Drop (RPD), namely, the liberal omission of any grammatical argument in languages like Chinese, requires agglutinating morphology on pronouns. N&S derive this generalization from three assumptions: a) null arguments are zero spell-outs of regular pronouns (Perlmutter 1971), b) spell-out rules for pronouns may target non-terminal nodes in the syntax (Weerman and Evers-Vermeul 2002) and c) the Elsewhere Principle (Kiparsky 1973) with its three notable features shown in (1a-c).

1. The problem The central question for the analysis of “headless” relative clauses, also known as free relatives (henceforth FRs), concerns the position of the wh-phrase (what in (1)), and in particular whether it raises to a clause-internal or clause-external position (see van Riemsdijk 2006a for a survey and references). (1) (I eat) [FR whati you cook ti] The crucial property of (1) is its nominal character: It occurs in a position otherwise restricted to a DP argument. This is the way in which what you cook in (1) differs from what you cook in (2), where the same string is interpreted as an indirect question: (2) (I wonder) [Q whati you cook ti] In languages like German, where nominal elements can occur in the middle field but (finite) clausal categories can do so only very marginally, the asymmetry between FRs and embedded questions comes out clearly: (3) Ich werde [FR was ich gefunden habe] niemandem (t) zeigen I will what I found have nobody show 'I won't show to anybody what I found' (4) ??Mir hat sie [Q wer es gesagt hat] ja nicht (t) gesagt me has she who it said has PRT not said

The article demonstrates that the rescue-by-PF-deletion account of the amelioration effect of island violations under ellipsis, originally noted by Ross (1969), can be extended to account for the that-trace effect, including the adverb amelioration effect, and the lack of intervention effects with certain null arguments that are otherwise found with their overt counterparts, as well as to deduce the generalizations that traces do not count as interveners for relativized minimality effects and that traces void islandhood. The fact that the rescue-by-PF-deletion analysis makes it possible to unify a number of previously unrelated phenomena should be taken as a strong argument in its favor. The current extension of the rescue-by-PF-deletion approach, on which the rescue can arise not only through the deletion process involved in ellipsis but also through regular copy deletion, also accounts for the different behavior of the Superiority Condition and the Wh-Island Condition with respect to the amelioration effect under ellipsis, a surprising difference given that both of these are generally subsumed under relativized minimality effects in current research.

By analogy with the movement analysis of temporal clauses, some authors have proposed that conditional clauses be derived by leftward operator movement (Bhatt and Pancheva 2002, 2006, Arsenijević 2009, Tomaszewicz 2009). This movement analysis of conditional clauses is shown to account for the incompatibility of main clause phenomena and conditional clauses in terms of intervention effects. The cartographic implementation of this analysis predicts that conditional clauses will be incompatible with speaker-oriented modal expressions and that conditional clauses will lack the low-construal reading found in temporal clauses (Bhatt and Pancheva 2002, 2006). Thus, the absence of low construal in conditional clauses, which was initially taken to be an obstacle for the movement account of conditional clauses (see Citko 2000), becomes an argument in its favor.

Although they participate in control relations, implicit arguments are standardly viewed as unprojected ϑ-roles, absent from the syntax. I challenge this view and argue that implicit arguments are syntactically represented. The argument rests on the observation that implicit arguments can exercise partial control, and the claim that partial control must be encoded in the syntax (given plausible assumptions on the limits of lexical relations). I further argue that the syntactic constitution of implicit arguments is more impoverished than that of pro, explaining their differential visibility to various syntactic processes.

This article offers a critical examination of De Vries's (2006) account of appositive relatives, which treats appositive relatives and nominal appositions alike and assimilates both to coordinate structures. Its main focus is on the following properties of appositive relatives: (a) the category of the appositive head, (b) the case of the appositive head, (c) relative pronoun selection, (d) extraction phenomena, (e) the typology of specifying coordinators, and (f) the lack of prenominal appositives. It examines these properties from both an empirical and a theoretical perspective, contrasting De Vries's account with a version of an adjunction account.

The article argues for the Comp account (e.g., Groos and Van Riemsdijk 1981) over the head account (e.g., Bresnan and Grimshaw 1978) of free relatives (FRs), on the basis of several converging arguments from Croatian. Evidence from reconstruction effects shows that the wh-phrase introducing a free relative (WHFR) originates inside the relative clause and wh-moves to its surface position. In addition, arguments from clitic placement show that the derived position of the WHFR is no higher than Spec,CP of the FR.

As shown by Kayne (1975), Romance causatives with faire fall into two classes, faire infinitif (FI) and faire par (FP). We argue from Italian data that the properties of the two classes depend on the nature of the complement of fare:FI embeds a vP, FP a nominalized VP. The syntactic and semantic characteristics of these complements account straightforwardly for well-known differences between FI and FP, including the previously untreated “obligation” requirement in FI, absent in FP. Our analysis also accounts for another subtle restriction on the formation of FP: the existence of an animacy requirement on the subject of fare, absent in FI. Finally, we argue that only FP can undergo passivization; this accounts for a previously unobserved asymmetry in passivizability of causatives of unergative and unaccusative intransitive verbs.

Under the view of nominative Case taken by Chomsky (2000, 2001), one would expect nominative to be the marked or complex Case, being merged after accusative. In fact, however, it is the other way around, nominative preconditioning accusative and also being the Case of simple structures (unaccusative, etc.). The article argues that this Nominative Puzzle is not real, the nominative argument in fact being the first argument merged, raised across the accusative later in the derivation for independent reasons. This approach not only accounts for the dependency correlation between accusative and nominative (Burzio’s Generalization), but also offers a derivational account of Condition A correlations (anaphors being merged higher than their ‘‘antecedents’’). Importantly, it also makes it possible to explain Icelandic quirky constructions in terms of a general matching theory. In addition, the article develops a novel approach to Move as applying for the purpose of successful feature matching.

Branigan and MacKenzie (2000, 2002) argue that cross-clausal agreement (CCA) in Innu-aimufn (Central Algonquian) is an example of Aagreement. In this squib, we propose that all agreement in Innu-aimuin and other Algonquian languages is in fact A-agreement. As is well known, agreement targets are selected on the basis of relative animacy rather than grammatical relations in these languages. Following Bruening (2001), we assume that they have a designated position for the argument that is highest on the animacy hierarchy.' However, we argue that this is an A-position, given its function, position, and interaction with other syntactic processes. We propose that the absence of A-agreement derives from a property that characterizes all Algonquian languages: either they lack TP altogether, or T is not specified for Case or D-features. The evidence for our claim comes from the lack of other A-syntax phenomena related to Spec,T, including Case, Case-motivated A-movement, and A-binding.2 On our proposal, arguments are projected into the vP, licensed by familiar 0-relations. They do not move for Case agreement, but only for discourse purposes such as topic or focus, or for wh-questions. We suggest that in the absence of A-movement and A-checking, these languages rely instead on A-positions for agreement triggers and landing sites for movement.

It has been assumed that wh-in-situ does not license parasitic gaps (PGs) (Engdahl 1983). Some researchers, such as Nissenbaum (1999) and Kim (2001), argue against this hypothesis and propose that wh-in-situ is potentially capable of licensing PGs. Kim specifically predicts that the wh-phrases in wh-in-situ languages can license PGs. But Kim also mention that this prediction is empirically difficult to test, since those languages known to lack syntactic wh-movement, such as Chinese and Japanese, permit ''empty resumptive pronouns in argument positions, and it is thus difficult to determine whether an empty category in an argument position is a PG or an empty pronominal (Kim 2001). In this squib, I argue that Kim's prediction does not hold. In particular, I will show that (a) wh-in-situ in Chinese does not license PGs, and (b) PGs are indeed attested in Chinese, and they must be licensed by syntactic wh-movement.

Wh-questions like What is your plan? and Which is your plan? differ in terms of the notion of D-linking. Unlike the answer to the What-question, the answer to the Which-question is supposed to be drawn from a set of individuals previously introduced into the discourse. If what and which are syntactic atoms with no internal syntax, their observed semantic difference, and therefore the D-linking semantics, too, must be lexical in origin. However, there is no a priori reason why the origin of D-linking should, as a UG property, be lexical. In this squib, the A. argues that UG permits the possibility that D-linking is instead a syntactic phenomenon. More specifically, he argues that the D-linking semantics can arise through the local binding of pro by the (null) interrogative operator. He bases his argument on two genetically and geographically unrelated languages, Japanese and Plains Cree. The emerging picture is that as far as D-linking is concerned, the semantic difference between the two wh-questions can be reduced to the type of the constituent that the interrogative operator binds

It is well known that in sluicing constructions wh-dependencies can cross certain projections that are otherwise barriers to movement (Ross 1969, Chomsky 1972). This fact would follow under the assumption that the relevant barriers are somehow deactivated when phonologically deleted (“island repair”). The problem, however, is that another form of phonological deletion (VP-ellipsis; VPE) seems to be impossible in certain contexts where sluicing allows for island repair (Chung, Ladusaw, and McCloskey 1995, Merchant 2001). Nevertheless, we argue against the conclusion that island repair is a special property of sluicing. The argument is based on two observations. First, the difference between sluicing and VPE seems too broad to warrant the conclusion that island repair is the distinguishing factor (Lasnik 2001). Second, the conclusion is directly refuted by other VPE environments where island repair is possible (Kennedy and Merchant 2000; Fox, in preparation). The argument leaves us with a puzzle that we attempt to resolve while still maintaining the null hypothesis that VPE and sluicing involve the same operation of deletion, differing only in the size of the deleted constituent. Our proposed resolution capitalizes on a special property of the relevant sluicing contexts—namely, the presence of an indefinite NP in the antecedent clause in a position parallel to that of a trace in the elided clause. We argue that given the parallelism conditions on ellipsis, this fact prevents the wh-phrase in the elided clause from undergoing successive-cyclic movement. The remaining option (one-fell-swoop movement) requires the deletion of all barriers, including those that would otherwise be circumvented via an intermediate landing site. Such deletion occurs in sluicing but not in VPE, which targets a smaller constituent.

This article examines the syntactic properties of a long-distanceagreement construction in Innu-aimûn (Algonquian)in which a matrix verb may agree with an argument in its complement clause, normally with an associated topic interpretation for the DP target of agreement. It is shown that this is true cross-clausal agreement into a finite complement, rather than agreement with a prothetic object or exceptional Case marking. The topic interpretation effect is shown to reflect a (covert) Ā-movement that produces a complement clause with an accessible target for agreement at the left periphery.

The article establishes a novel generalization concerning the placement of arguments by Spell-Out. It centers on the principles that force arguments to leave the VP across languages. The empirical domain consists of constructions where subject movement is not required for reasons that have to do with the Extended Projection Principle. In these environments and whenever a sentence contains both a subject and a direct object, one of the arguments must vacate the VP. We argue that argument externalization is related to Case. It is forced because movement of both arguments to a single head T0 that contains two active Case features in the covert component is banned.

The English of northwestern Ireland allows quantifier float of a previously undocumented kind in wh-questions. The quantifier all, though construed with a fronted wh-pronoun, may appear in a position considerably to the right of that pronoun. It is argued that all so stranded marks a position through which a wh-phrase has passed or in which a wh-phrase originates. The construction then provides visible evidence for intermediate derivational stages. This evidence is used to develop a new argument for successive cyclicity and to argue for overt object shift in English and for an origin site for subjects strictly within VP and below the object shift position.

This article investigates the argument structure of middle predicates. It argues that middle verbs syntactically project the entire argument grids of their active counterparts; however, middle verbs, like passive verbs, project the external (Agent) arguments of their active counterparts as adjuncts. These demoted Agent arguments can appear, in middle constructions, as the objects of for-PPs.

Levin and Rappaport Hovav (1995) (henceforth L&RH) show that resultative predication serves as a diagnostic for unaccusativity in English: if a resultative can be predicated of the single argument of a monadic verb, that verb is unaccusative. However, they point out that if a monadic verb cannot occur with a resultative, it does not necessarily follow that the verb in question is not unaccusative. For example, they conclude on the basis of (1) *Willa arrived breathless that the subclass of unaccusatives they call verbs of inherently directed motion (henceforth VIDMs) are incompatible with resultatives for independent reasons. In this squib I argue that L&RH's account for the apparent incompatibility of resultatives with VIDMs cannot be maintained and that the ungrammaticality exhibited by (1) is found with all unaccusatives. Thus, it cannot be concluded on the basis of this example that VIDMs are incompatible with resultatives. Given L&RH's explanation for the types of resultatives that can occur with inherently delimited verbs like breath, I argue that VIDMs, like all inherently delimited unaccusatives, are compatible with resultatives