Three Systems of Remnant Movement II and Extraction from Specifier Position

External possession meets bare nouns in Malagasy

“…To simplify presentation of my analysis, I assume a non-Kaynean structure rather than the more popular predicate-fronting and "roll-up" structures proposed in Pearson (2001), Rackowski and Travis (2000) and others. The ordering of arguments and adjuncts in Malagasy and Niuean pose non-trivial difficulties for these types of analysis, as discussed by Massam (2006) and Thiersch (2006). These questions about phrase structure are surely empirical, but the analysis presented in this paper can easily be transposed into an antisymmetrical system with no loss of the core ideas (e.g.…”

A note on the scope of adverbs in Malagasy

“…The tree in (10b) [next page] illustrates (9a-b); step (9c) was illustrated in (5a) and (5b) for (4), a sentence without adverbs. 6 While one can quibble with many of the details and assumptions, including the problem of DP placement discussed in Thiersch (2004), the capturing of these three phenomena (other arguments are given in Pearson and R&T) seems sufficient motivation to question an apparent counterexample.…”

“…This is merged with the (phonetically null) copula COP and then again with the adverb foana, "internal" to the COP projection, but C-commanding the rest of the structure: 12 Note that it would seem at first glance that Rasoa could not be extracted directly from the subject position of COP, since at the point in the derivation in which it is merged with Piv 0 , it is in a (specifier) island. However, to capture the distinction between possible and impossible extraction from specifier position, R&T need to rely on Rackowski (1998)'s distinction between segments and categories; see Thiersch (2004) for discussion. The same applies here, as shown by the tree in (35a) under their assumptions, Rasoa can move from the bottom position under misakafo which is on a right-branch to Spec,CopP; in CopP it is only dominated by a segment and hence can extract to Spec,PivP.…”

“…While it would seem that the adverbs ought to fall naturally into two classes, there is a potential problem with this; see § 5 below. As to using the presence of the adverb in the specifier to block roll-up and alternatives, see discussion in Thiersch (2004), especially the expanded version.…”