Island sensitivity and case matching in Uyghur pseudo-prolepsis

Abstract

Movement and binding constitute two classes of dependencies between nominals. Movement dependencies tend to have stricter locality requirements and involve connectivity effects between positions, while binding can often occur over longer distances and does not involve featural connectivity between the two positions. While the objects in movement are restricted to be identical — only surfacing differently in the case of deletion or use of pronominals — the objects of a binding dependency can have independent lexical content (Nunes 1995; Aoun et al. 2001). This paper concerns a kind of dependency between two DPs in Uyghur, originally classified as proleptic (Major 2021a; Rabinovitch 2022), in which the two positions associated with the dependency possess the locality restrictions and case connectivity effects of movement, while also having the independence of form associated with a binding dependency. This paper argues that this construction, dubbed here as ‘pseudo-prolepsis’, is a form of subextraction, in which a complex DP contains two coreferent DPs, one of which undergoes movement into a higher position. Locality and connectivity properties of the dependency derive from this movement, while the presence of a coreferent DP in the base position gives the illusion that the movement involves a chain of two lexically independent elements. The existence of ‘pseudo-prolepsis’ demonstrates that the independence of form between two elements in a dependency is not sufficient to rule out a movement dependency or diagnose binding.