TY - JOUR
T1 - Unvalued interpretable features and topic A-movement in Chinese raising modal constructions
AU - Chou, Chao Ting Tim
N1 - Funding Information:
I am much indebted to Samuel D. Epstein, Acrisio Pires, and four anonymous reviewers for their rigorous and penetrating comments that have led to significant improvement of different versions of this paper. Portions of this research have been presented at the 24th North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics, the 36th Annual Penn Linguistics Colloquium, and the 84th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America. I would like to thank the audiences at those venues for their encouragement and stimulating questions, especially Chen-Sheng Liu, Chi-Ming Liu, and Yin Li. I gratefully acknowledge the financial support from the Humanities Candidacy Research Fellowship and the Predoctoral Fellowship from the Rackham Graduate School and Linguistics Department at the University of Michigan. Finally, I take sole responsibility for any remaining errors or inconsistencies.
PY - 2013/1
Y1 - 2013/1
N2 - The purpose of this paper is three-fold: (i) I argue that topic A-movement exists in Chinese. Specifically, I show that argument displacement in Chinese raising modal constructions (RMC) containing raising modals like yinggai 'should' and keneng 'likely' is A-movement to spec-TP, yet semantically exhibits topicality; (ii) even though Miyagawa's (2010) extension of Chomsky's (2007, 2008) feature inheritance hypothesis to the Topic feature provides a possible derivational system to capture topic A-movement in this construction, I show that object topic A-movement in this construction is underivable under Miyagawa's (2010) probe-driven system of movement based on feature inheritance. This is because of a timing problem regarding feature inheritance and Chomsky's (2001) Phase-Impenetrability Condition independently noted by Epstein et al. (2012) and Richards (2011); (iii) I propose that two major modifications are needed to maintain the basic assumptions of Miyagawa (2010) to derive object topic A-movement in RMC: (a) a more fine-grained characterization of topic A-movement on the basis of the dissociation of feature interpretability and feature valuation (see Pesetsky and Torrego, 2007; Carstens, 2010, 2011; Bošković, in press), and (b) the adoption of Bošković's (2007) moving-element-driven theory of movement.
AB - The purpose of this paper is three-fold: (i) I argue that topic A-movement exists in Chinese. Specifically, I show that argument displacement in Chinese raising modal constructions (RMC) containing raising modals like yinggai 'should' and keneng 'likely' is A-movement to spec-TP, yet semantically exhibits topicality; (ii) even though Miyagawa's (2010) extension of Chomsky's (2007, 2008) feature inheritance hypothesis to the Topic feature provides a possible derivational system to capture topic A-movement in this construction, I show that object topic A-movement in this construction is underivable under Miyagawa's (2010) probe-driven system of movement based on feature inheritance. This is because of a timing problem regarding feature inheritance and Chomsky's (2001) Phase-Impenetrability Condition independently noted by Epstein et al. (2012) and Richards (2011); (iii) I propose that two major modifications are needed to maintain the basic assumptions of Miyagawa (2010) to derive object topic A-movement in RMC: (a) a more fine-grained characterization of topic A-movement on the basis of the dissociation of feature interpretability and feature valuation (see Pesetsky and Torrego, 2007; Carstens, 2010, 2011; Bošković, in press), and (b) the adoption of Bošković's (2007) moving-element-driven theory of movement.
KW - A-movement
KW - Chinese syntax
KW - Feature inheritance
KW - Minimalism
KW - Phase-Impenetrability Condition
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U2 - 10.1016/j.lingua.2012.10.014
DO - 10.1016/j.lingua.2012.10.014
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84870894899
SN - 0024-3841
VL - 123
SP - 118
EP - 147
JO - Lingua
JF - Lingua
IS - 1
ER -