Successive Cyclicity in DPs: Evidence From Mongolian Nominalized Clauses

1 Introduction

A well-established property of long-distance movement is that it is successive-cyclic: phrasal movement of an XP from its base position to the one where it is pronounced takes place in a series of shorter steps. This punctuated nature of movement is often tied to phasehood. Phases are taken to be special in that they (a) may provide intermediate positions along the path of successive-cyclic movement where moving XPs can stop off and (b) force XPs to land in these positions by virtue of being opaque domains otherwise. By now, there is a growing body of evidence that long-distance movement stops off at the edge of each intervening CP (Henry 1995, McCloskey 2002, Torrego 1984) and vP (Bruening 2001, Rackowski and Richards 2005, Van Urk 2015) (see Citko 2014 for an overview). However, it is debated whether DP, another purported phasal domain, hosts escape hatches and allows intermediate movement through its edge (Bach and Horn 1976, Chomsky 1973, Cinque 1980, Gavruseva 2000, Giorgi and Longobardi 1991, Matushansky 2005, Svenonius 2004, Szabolcsi 1994, Tellier 1991). On the one hand, Complex Noun Phrase Constraint effects as in (1) may be taken to show that DPs lack an escape hatch.

(1)

 

On the other hand, left-branch extraction facts crosslinguistically have been argued to show the opposite (Cinque 1980, Gavruseva 2000, Giorgi and Longobardi 1991, Szabolcsi 1984, 1994). For instance, Szabolcsi (1994) shows for Hungarian that only possessors that appear to the left of determiners when nonextracted can undergo movement from their containing DP. She and others (see, e.g., Gavruseva 2000) have tied this to the availability of an escape hatch position within DP. Similarly, in Romance, only those arguments that can be possessivized can move out of the DP, which has also been taken to show that XPs must pass through Spec,DP in order to move out of the phase (Cinque 1980, Giorgi and Longobardi 1991). However, such an interpretation of these facts is not uncontroversial. Left-branch extraction data have been analyzed by others as showing instead the absence of a D layer altogether (Bošković 2005, 2014, Uriagereka 1998). Thus, the question remains: does DP allow—and require—movement of phase-internal material through its edge?

In this squib, I present novel evidence from Mongolian (Mongolic) showing that movement happens successive-cyclically from at least some DPs. Nominalizations in Mongolian require Ā-movement out of them to stop off at Spec,DP. Supporting evidence comes from unexpected interactions between embedded subject case and movement. Subjects of these nominalized clauses can ordinarily receive nominative (nom), genitive (gen), or accusative (acc) case. The subject of a nominalized clause receives acc case if it occupies Spec,DP, but movement from within the clause disrupts this case possibility. Specifically, (a) acc on the subject of a nominalized clause is impossible when a nonsubject undergoes movement out of that DP, and (b) acc is impossible on the subject of any intermediate nominalized clause that is crossed by movement. I argue that the (un)availability of acc case marking is a reflex of successive cyclicity in DPs: when acc on a nominalized clause subject is blocked, it signals that the edge of that DP has been targeted for intermediate movement. More broadly, these results lead to the conclusion that Spec,DP serves as a landing site for intermediate movement in at least some DPs and suggest that phases of any category can, in principle, provide escape hatches for movement out of them.

2 Mongolian Nominalized Clauses and Subject Case

2.1 Nominalized Clauses Are Nominals

Subordinate clauses in Mongolian are ordinarily headed by the complementizer gež (2). But in addition, a range of embedding predicates, including verbs of perception (xarsax ‘see’, sonsax ‘hear’), (certain) cognitive factives (medex ‘know’, olž medex ‘find out’), and verbs of saying (xelsex ‘tell’), take nominalized complements. Though an overt nominalizer is absent, the nominal nature of these clauses is illustrated by the fact that they are obligatorily case-marked (3), can be complements of prepositions (4), and can appear in subject positions (5). CPs in this language do not show...