Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

In this talk I focus on the locality profile of movement in non-finite relatives in English, particular those formed from infinitives. We see two complementary patterns uncharacteristic of A-bar movement: subject only extraction, and non-subject only extraction. The central intuition is that these restrictions arise from smaller clause structures of these relatives, and how that interacts with locality principles. For the non-subject only cases, I will particularly exploit notions of anti-locality, or a restriction against movement landing too close to the launch site. Along the way we’ll see how this also makes sense of peculiarities in finite relatives. I’ll briefly touch on long distance dependencies and the wider crosslinguistic picture, both of which are challenging in their own ways. Work in progress, comments welcome!