In defense of defective intervention

Abstract

Bruening (2014) has recently challenged the status of defective intervention as a real syntactic phenomenon, arguing that it is actually the effect of linear order. Our first goal is to show that Bruening’s (2014) potential counterexamples to the existence of syntactic defective intervention are only apparent. We will provide an explanation for his data based on adverb placement and the hierarchical architecture of clauses with experiencers. Moreover, we aim to provide a typology of Romance languages that either prohibit defective intervention like Brazilian Portuguese (BP) and Italian or languages of the Romanian/Spanish-type that obviate defective intervention on the basis of the availability of clitic doubling (Anagnostopoulou 2003, 2005).