Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

Some notes on locality: Hyperlocality, impenetrability, and intervention.

Classical approaches to locality have developed and implemented two distinct concepts:

1.      Impenetrability: certain syntactic configurations are impervious to syntactic movement (e.g., island constraints, various versions of Phase Impenetrability).

2.      Intervention: movement is blocked across an intervener with certain structural properties (e.g., various versions of Relativized Minimality).

In addition to such cases, certain processes have been recognized to respect even stricter locality conditions: hyperlocality. E.g., selection (thematic assignment) typically does not cross boundaries of maximal projections.

In the first part of the talk I would like to focus on hyperlocality and suggest that its scope is not limited to selectional processes: certain manifestations of morphological agreement are sensitive to hyperlocality. I will discuss in this context forms of phi feature spreading within the Romance DP, and Greenberg’s Universal 33 on number agreement in Subject-Verb and Verb-Subject configurations.

Intervention and impenetrability locality are known to have overlapping effects in a number of structural environments. A prototypical case is the analysis of wh-islands, which follow (at least in their core manifestations) both from Phase Impenetrability and from Relativized Minimality. Can this redundancy be eliminated?  I will show that RM effects cannot be reduced to PI effects in various domains of the analysis of Weak Islands. This will lead us to also revisit aspects of case overwriting processes, and of the structural distinction between indirect questions and free relatives. Can the opposite deduction be considered, with PI effects reduced to RM? I will not address this question in full generality, but will briefly discuss some evidence suggesting that this kind of reduction project is worth pursuing.