Shigeru Miyagawa (MIT/Tokyo)
Case and A/A'-movements
(This work is a collaboration with Despina Oikonomou, HU-Berlin)We argue for a new way to look at the constellation of data having to do with Condition C reconstruction effects. We propose that Case, which is a key component of Wholesale Late Merger (Takahashi 2006, Takahashi & Hulsey 2009 (TTH)), is an issue not about the head of the chain, as TTH argue, but rather it should be viewed as an issue associated with the lower copy.
Case Interpretation Requirement (CIR)
In a link ...α ... β...
If β is case-marked, it must be interpreted in full.
This accounts for the familiar cases of Condition C reconstruction effects reported in the literature. It also accounts for A-movement scrambling that unexpectedly triggers a Condition C reconstruction effect (Hindi, Bhatt and Keine 2019; Japanese, Saito 1992; Mongolian, Gong 2021). Here A-movement behaves like A'-movement because the lower copy is case-marked. Similar facts hold for the CLLD construction in some Romance languages (e.g., Cecchetto 2000).
We also argue that the CIR accounts for a sharp variation in Condition C reconstruction effect for long-distance wh-movement between English-type and German-type languages.