Tuesday 26 March – Eefje Boef & Irene Franco

Title: Complementizer-trace effects: a crosslinguistic perspective
Speakers: E. Boef  (ZAS Berlin) & Irene Franco (LUCL Leiden)
Venue: Lipsius/235b
Time: 15:15-16:30

Abstract
In this talk we present ongoing research on the well-known complementizer-trace (COMP-t) effect in the lower clause of long-distance A-bar dependencies (specifically relative clauses and wh-questions). The COMP-t effect, by which a finite declarative complementizer cannot be directly followed by a trace is illustrated in (1) for standard English.

(1)       a.         I know the man that you said  (*that) t came here.
b.       I know the man that you said (that) Mary will meet t tomorrow.

The COMP-t effect is certainly not a universal phenomenon, and its absence has traditionally been related to the availability of null subjects in a language. However, such a generalization does not hold universally, as can be seen in Icelandic in (2).

(2)      a.         Ég þekki manninn sem þú   sagðir %(að) kom   hingað.
I    know man.the  sem you said that came here
b.         Ég hata manninn sem þú sagðir %(að) María ætlar að hitta t á  morgun.
I  hate man.the sem you said that Maria is.going to meet  tomorrow

We provide a cross-linguistic typology of the COMP-t effect starting from Germanic, and extending to Romance. We show that besides the null subject parameter, other morphosyntactic properties play a role as well, such as the presence of V-to-C movement in embedded extraction contexts and D-morphology on the declarative complementizer.

We propose that the lowest C-head in the left periphery (Fin0) encodes a D-feature that requires checking in order to make the subject interpretable: in Germanic this checking requires move or merge to FinP, whereas in (some) Romance languages D can be checked by the subject in IP.

In extraction contexts (where COMP-t effects emerge), there are several ways to check D on FinP: (i) expletive/resumptive pronoun insertion;  (ii) V-to-Fin movement; (iii) D-morphology on the complementizer. If none of these strategies are available in a language, the complementizer needs to be dropped in order for the D-feature to be checked higher up the A-bar chain. Put differently, the complementizer in this case acts as a sort of intervener.

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