This paper revisits the case of “Focus-movement” as manifested in one of its best-studied instances, Hungarian, and assesses it in relation to views of Abar movement within Chomsky’s (1995, 2000) Minimalist Program. I examine whether the movement is due to a formal [Focus] feature, and provide detailed argumentation against this hypothesis. The paper motivates the proposal that the movement involves a distinct quantificational “Exhaustive Identification” (EI) operator, which interacts with Focus only indirectly. It claims that the [EI] operator feature projects a clausal functional head that drives the syntactic movement construed mistakenly in the literature to be Focus-driven movement. After a cross-linguistic exploration of Focus-related movements, the paper evaluates the implications for the tenability of purely interface-based treatments of Focus.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.