Displacement is a fundamental property of grammar. Typically, when an occurrence moves it is pronounced in only one environment. This was previously viewed as a primitive/irreducible property of grammar. Recent work, however, suggests that it follows from principled interactions between the syntactic and phonological components of grammar. As such, the phonetic character of movement chains can be seen as both a reflection of and probe into the syntax-phonology interface. This volume deals with repetition, an atypical outcome of movement operations in which displaced elements are pronounced multiple times. Although cross-linguistically rare, the phenomenon obtains robustly in Nupe, a Benue-Congo language of Nigeria. Repetition raises a tension of the descriptive-explanatory variety. In order to achieve both measures of adequacy, movement theory must be supplemented with an account of the conditions that drive and constrain multiple pronunciation. This book catalogs these conditions, bringing to light a number of undocumented aspects of Nupe grammar.
We propose a movement account of why some verb phrases seem to be head-final in the Nupe language whereas others seem to be head-initial. Several converging arguments are given that verbs come before their complements in the underlying structure. Apparent counterexamples come from the presence of identifiable functional heads within the verb phrase structure that attract NPs to their specifier position. Two such heads are distinguished: Agr O 0 , which attracts an NP nonlocally for purposes of licensing accusative Case, and Infin 0 , which attracts the closest NP to check an EPP feature regardless of whether it is Case marked. We briefly compare our analysis to remnant movement analyses to sharpen the typology of leftward movement in natural language. We conclude that the success of Kayne's (1994) approach to word order depends on uncovering and cataloging the triggers of these movements.
I argue that verbal resumption (the occurrence of an additional default verbal element yε meaning ‘do’) in Asante Twi is prosodically conditioned. Following the MATCH theory of syntactic-prosodic constituency correspondence ( Selkirk 2011 ), I propose that phonosyntactic constituency matching requires, at the minimum, avoidance of phonetically empty transferred syntactic structures (i.e., prosodic vacuity). I show that Twi verbal resumption is highly constrained and occurs precisely in those contexts where a prosodically vacuous domain would otherwise be mapped from a fully evacuated syntactic Spell- Out domain. As a measure of last resort, a late default-form insertion of the verb root (the yε-form) occurs to evade prosodic vacuity and ensure a matching correspondence between syntactic and prosodic constituents at PF. Because an additional higher copy of the verb root (i.e., the lexical verb) survives as well, Twi verbal resumption represents an instance of multiple copy Spell-Out. The article thus bears on several issues concerning the syntax-phonology interface, among them the nature of prosodic mapping and the conditions regulating multiple copy realization.
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