Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

Finding a place for position: selective opacity to relativisation in Swahili

This talk examines the relationship between clause structure and the locality of movement dependencies in Swahili (Bantu, East Africa) relative clauses, summarising key aspects of my recently defended PhD thesis. Relatives in this language optionally feature a complementiser amba (Ashton 1947, Barrett-Keach 1980, Vitale 1981). The crucial observation is that some complement clauses are opaque to movement formingamba-less relatives, but not their amba-bearing counterparts.  I attribute this difference in locality to two interacting factors. First, relatives withoutamba are formed by movement to a position lower in the clause than relatives with amba: e.g. Spec TP vs Spec CP. One consequence of the lower movement is a truncated clause structure, reflected in word order contrasts and morphosyntactic restrictions. Second, movement is subject to the Williams Cycle (e.g. Williams 2003, 2011):movement across a clause boundary cannot land in a position lower in clausal functional sequence than the clause boundary to be crossed. In other words, movement out of a CP-sized clause cannot land any lower than Spec CP in the higher clause. This locality restriction follows from the interaction between the timing of clausal embedding and a version of the Strict Cycle Condition. I conclude by showing the limitations of an alternative analysis of the facts in terms of featural intervention. Swahili relatives thus highlight the value of maintaining position-based locality principles, rather than trying to handle all instances of selective opacity/weak islands using Relativised Minimality.