21 November – Sjef Barbiers

Speaker: Sjef Barbiers (Universiteit Utrecht)
Title: Landing sites and stranding sites
Time: 13:15 – 14:30
Venue:Eyckhof2/004

Abstract
There is a growing body of evidence for Chomsky’s claim (Chomsky 1986 and subsequent work) that vP is an intermediate landing site for long distance (LD) movement, cf. Barbiers (2002) for Dutch, Rackowski and Richards (2005) for Tagalog, Den Dikken (2009) for Hungarian and Koopman (2010) for West Ulster English and Dutch. Traditionally, embedded SpecCP is taken to be an intermediate landing site as well. The first claim of this talk, extending Barbiers (2002), is that these two types of intermediate landing sites behave categorically distinct on a series of stranding tests (P-stranding, Dutch floating quantifier zoal ‘so all’, Dutch floating quantifier allemaal ‘all’, focus particle maar ‘only’, wat voor ‘what for’ split and remnant indefinite DP). Stranding is never possible in embedded SpecCP and always possible in vP, both embedded and matrix. With doubling we find the opposite pattern: doubling is possible in embedded SpecCP but never in vP (cf. Barbiers, Koeneman and Lekakou 2009). I argue that (sub-)extraction from embedded SpecCP of propositional clauses is impossible because there is no selectional relation between the matrix verb and the embedded interrogative clause. (Sub-)extraction from embedded SpecCP can only give rise to a converging derivation if the offending copy in SpecCP is spelled out, yielding doubling (cf. Boef 2013 and van Craenenbroeck and van Koppen 2008). The second claim of this talk is that the picture according to which vP is a landing site of intermediate movement steps is too simple. Using the hierarchy of projections as proposed in Cinque (1999) I show that at least 4 different intermediate landing sites have to be distinguished. Which one is chosen depends on the type of constituent that moves through it, as can be made visible with stranded material.

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