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Raising, unphased

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Abstract

This paper investigates cross-linguistic variation in raising-to-subject constructions, proposing a unified account for the derivation of hyper-raising and standard raising. I argue that the presence or absence of these constructions in a given language can be determined without recourse to phases by independent properties of CP and TP in the language, including: (1) whether CPs or infinitival phrases are phi-goals in the language and (2) the presence of an EPP effect on T and (and how it can be satisfied). I show that variation in these factors can capture a number of different raising profiles found cross-linguistically, including the hyper-raising pattern found in Zulu and Uyghur, the absence of raising in Makhuwa and Matengo, and the more familiar pattern of English.

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Notes

  1. All otherwise unsourced English data in this paper reflects my own native speaker intuitions.

  2. All unsourced Zulu data in this paper was collected by me in consultation with native speakers of Durban Zulu in Durban, South Africa, in 2011, 2012, and 2015. Bantu agreement is for noun class. Zulu has 15 of the 22 Bantu noun classes (numbers 1–11, 14–17); even numbers are typically plurals of odd-numbered classes. A nominal agrees if the noun class marked on the noun matches the number of the agreement marker. I mark class 1 subject agreement as 1s, but 1sg.s for 1st person singular, etc. Other abbreviations follow the Leipzig Glossing Rules with the addition of the following: assoc associative, aug augment vowel, prt participial agreement, ya (present tense) disjoint marker.

  3. I set aside other points of cross-linguistic variation for the purposes of this discussion, including the question of which copy or copies of the raised argument are pronounced (see, for example, Polinsky and Potsdam 2006, 2011on this question).

  4. Though see e.g. Hornstein (1999) for arguments that obligatory control is an instantiation of raising. I set aside this issue here.

  5. Note, though, that only adjectival—and for some speakers, nominal—small clauses can combine with raising predicates in English. As a number of authors have discussed, verbal small clauses are ungrammatical in this environment: *John seems leave/leaving (e.g. Williams 1983, 1984; Basilico 2003) I will return to this issue in Sect. 5.2.

  6. Ura’s full list includes at least two languages that he mischaracterizes as permitting hyper-raising, Persian and Acehnese, which I omit from the table here. Karimi (2005, 2008) provides evidence that the apparent hyper-raising construction in Persian is in fact an instance of topicalization, rather than of A-movement. Ura provides a purported Acehnese example in (2.9a) that appears to indicate that the subject of a finite embedded clause has raised to become an agreeing matrix subject in a passivized ECM construction; Ura refers to Durie (1985), which does not contain his reported examples, and does not provide argumentation for his analysis of the construction as involving A-movement out of a finite embedded clause. As Legate (2012, 2014) demonstrates, Acehnese has restructuring predicates that permit a long passive, yielding a string similar to the one Ura reports, where the embedded subject appears in matrix subject position. These constructions differ in two crucial respects from Ura’s characterization: first, as Legate shows, restructuring (and long passive) is only possible with embedded clauses no larger than vP; second, agreement in the matrix clause still tracks the matrix agent—and not the long-passivized argument (thanks to Julie Legate for noting these issues with Acehnese). Given these issues, the other languages in Ura’s sample should be scrutinized to determine whether they are in fact clear examples of a hyper-raising pattern.

  7. Carstens (2011) suggests that DPs in Bantu languages are endowed with valued, uninterpretable phi-features, which causes them to remain Active regardless of how many times they Agree; on such an approach, hyper-raising is the straightforward result of the embedded subject being the closest Active goal to the matrix phi-probe, but makes two assumptions—that hyper-raising is obligatory and that it occurs out of bare TP complements—that cannot hold for the cases discussed in this paper.

  8. It has been argued that these constructions might in fact involve a CP in topic position, rather than Spec,TP (e.g. Koster 1978; Alrenga 2005; Londahl 2014). For our pre-theoretical understanding of the EPP, it is simply enough to note that when a CP appears in preverbal position, no other element is required to fill Spec,TP. As we’ll see in Sect. 5, it is likely that preverbal CPs are not bare CPs, but are housed inside DP structure (Rosenbaum 1967; Davies and Dubinsky 2009; Hartman 2012a.o.).

  9. Note that in Zulu, the verb raises at least as high as Asp, above the base position of the subject (see Julien 2002; Buell 2005; Cheng and Downing 2014). The result is that vP-internal subjects appear in postverbal position.

  10. Movement to Spec,TP affects the interpretation of the subject (see e.g. Buell 2005; Cheng and Downing 2009, 2014; Halpert 2012; Zeller 2008). Roughly, vP-internal subjects typically receive focus or are part of a presentational focus construction, while vP-external subjects cannot be narrow focus. Cheng and Downing (2014) further suggest that preverbal subjects carry an existence presupposition. I abstract away from these interpretive issues here and instead focus on the agreement consequences that correlate with syntactic position. In Sect. 4.3 we will see a consequence of these effects for the behavior of infinitival complements of bonakala.

  11. Buell (2007) distinguishes between “semantic” and “formal” locative inversion. In formal locative inversion, the fronted phrase retains its locative morphology and agreement is either with the locative morphology itself or is expletive (but still not with the low subject). Semantic locative inversion, by contrast, involves a DP that receives a locative interpretation, but does not display locative morphology when in preverbal subject position, as illustrated in (31) above.

  12. As we’ll see in Sect. 5, van der Wal (2009, 2012, 2015) demonstrates that this link does not hold in all Bantu languages.

  13. I restrict the discussion here to the CPs found in raising, which are typically headed by the complementizer ukuthi. See Halpert (2012, 2015) for a discussion of differences between this type of CP and those headed by sengathi.

  14. There are particular contexts and constructions that will particularly favor or disfavor this agreement, so it is not a free option. See Halpert (2012) for discussion. The obligatory disjoint morpheme ya in (45a) is a signal of dislocation (Buell 2005), as seen in (41) above in infinitival clauses.

  15. Many speakers who reject this type of construction will spontaneously fix it by adding a head nominal and turning the phrase into a complex DP (Halpert 2015). See the Appendix for details of this construction and how it might present a parallel to the raising case discussed here.

  16. There is systematically no segmental reflex of the disjoint morpheme, ya in positive present contexts, under negation, which is why the fronted object clause in (48) controls agreement without the appearance of ya (see Buell 2005).

  17. There is, in fact, a second possible derivation that would yield (50a): where T first probes the embedded clause, and then inserts an expletive to satisfy the EPP, diverging from the derivation described for (50b) below.

  18. There are other approaches that also result in a single probe Agreeing with multiple goals (e.g. Hiraiwa 2001; Boeckx 2003; Henderson 2006). In the construction under discussion, it is crucial the probing not be simultaneous; even if we separate the operation into Match and Agree, along the lines of Boeckx (2003), we would fail to capture the fact that phi-agreement in Zulu can track the CP (first Agree operation) even when the embedded subject moves. In other words, agreement does not simply reflect the closest goal at the end of the derivation. I therefore continue with Deal’s formalization, though it is possible that other approaches could be made to yield the same result.

  19. A reviewer asks whether hyper-raising-to-object is also available in Zulu by the same mechanism, given that the language has object agreement that can target clauses. The answer is yes, raising-to-object out of finite clauses is possible, but as Halpert and Zeller (2015) discuss, it does not appear that the mechanism for this raising is object agreement. Due to the differences between the two constructions—and between the properties of subject and object agreement in Zulu more generally—this question is beyond the scope of this paper. I refer the reader to Halpert and Zeller (2015) for more discussion.

  20. Recall from the previous subsection that overt subjects of infinitives are expressed via the associative construction.

  21. We can see evidence for the size of the nominalized clauses in the case-marking possibilities: the NP-sized nominalizations are unable to bear overt case marking, while DP-sized nominalizations can be case-marked.

  22. Another difference between the Uyghur examples Asarina discusses and the Zulu patterns discussed here is that the relevant optionality in morphological spell out in Zulu involves different types of third person—changing only in noun class—while the Uyghur patterns involve changes in the person features of the clause vs. embedded subject. Initial evidence on the behavior of first and second person in Zulu raising constructions is mixed, so I set aside this issue for now, but it is possible that the type of phi-features involved in the agreement operations may play a role in determining the morphological possibilities.

  23. For Davies and Dubinsky (2009) and Hartman (2012), moved CPs are contained within covert DP structure. Moulton (2015) argues that bare CPs are incapable of leftward movement altogether.

  24. While Hornstein et al. (2008) argue that infinitival complements are case-marked, which might suggest that they do function as interveners, see Ishihara (2009) for an argument that bare infinitivals do not receive case in English.

  25. Along these lines, we might also wonder whether Hartman’s (2012) last resort DP structure ever applies to embedded CPs in raising contexts. It seems that we do find CP-fronting in English exactly where a DP argument would be permitted, as well as a CP, as a complement to the predicate, as Hartman would predict (Williams 1980; Webelhuth 1992; Alrenga 2005; Moulton 2009a.o.):

    1. (72)
      figure bt
    1. (73)
      figure bu

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Acknowledgements

Many thanks to all of my Zulu consultants for help with the Zulu data in this paper; in particular, I’m grateful to Mthuli Percival Buthelezi, Mpho Dlamini, Monwabisi Mhlophe, and the Katamzi family for their continued time and patience over the years. Thanks as well to Vicki Carstens, Michael Diercks, Julie Legate, David Pesetsky, Jenneke van der Wal, Jochen Zeller, three anonymous reviewers, and audiences at GLOW, WCCFL, UC Santa Cruz, UW-Milwaukee, McGill, MIT, and the University of KwaZulu-Natal for helpful feedback and discussion.

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    Claire Halpert

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Appendix:  Sentential subjects and complex DPs

Appendix:  Sentential subjects and complex DPs

Recall from Sect. 4 that Zulu does not permit ukuthi CPs in Spec,TP position:

  1. (80)
    figure cb

Many speakers who reject this type of construction will spontaneously fix it by adding a head nominal and turning the phrase into a complex DP. Remarkably, these complex DP subjects do not require agreement with the head nominal. Instead, either agreement with the nominal or ku- agreement is grammatical:

  1. (81)
    figure cc

I argue in Halpert (2012, 2015) that the ku- agreement in (81) is not an instance of expletive agreement, but rather a reflection of true phi-agreement with the CP component of the complex DP, claiming that this is possible because the NP and CP components are equidistant from the T probe, along the lines of appositive structure (e.g. de Vries 2006). I keep this general conclusion here—that the ku- in these constructions is T agreement with the CP—but argue for a different structure, based on the observation above that sentential CPs are disallowed in Zulu. The status of sentential subjects cross-linguistically is contentious; a number of researchers have suggested that even in languages like English, where we have the surface appearance of CPs in subject position, do not allow CPs to appear in Spec,TP—and that these constructions either involve a CP in topic position (e.g. Koster 1978; Alrenga 2005; Londahl 2014) or additional DP structure on the CP (e.g. Rosenbaum 1967; Davies and Dubinsky 2009; Hartman 2012). In particular, Hartman (2012) argues that clauses in Spec,TP always have DP structure and that a DP-shell may be inserted as a “last resort,” post-cyclically, in order to allow a clausal argument to raise to Spec,TP. While Zulu clearly does not have the type of covert DP structure that Hartman argues is available in English, we can imagine that at least some complex subject DPs in Zulu are created by the same process, but with the addition of an overt DP shell.

On this approach, a potential derivation for a complex DP subject would be as follows: First, T probes and agrees with the CP argument, which cannot move to Spec,TP, leaving the EPP unsatisfied. Then, Hartman’s last resort operation applies to add an overt DP shell to the CP argument. Since the EPP in Zulu must be satisfied by an agreeing element, T may probe a second time, as Halpert (2012, 2015) argues, to find the complex DP that has been created. As a result of this second Agree operation, the complex DP will move to Spec,TP to satisfy the EPP. While Hartman (2012) assumes for languages like English that agreement with T only results when DP structure is added—and not with the bare CP—in Zulu we have reason to think that agreement occurs at both stages: we saw that CPs bore phi-features that surface in object agreement constructions and we can understand the ku- agreement that surfaces with complex DP subjects as the result of the first Agree operation. In other words, when complex DPs are created via last resort in Zulu, T agrees with first the CP component and then the DP component, and can morphologically realize the outcome of either operation.

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    figure cd
  1. (83)
    figure ce

Hartman (2012) argues that this type of operation is only available when the clausal argument needs to move to Spec,TP. Object CPs in English, by contrast, never show evidence for added covert DP structure. We find this same type of asymmetry in Zulu: speakers report that object marking with a complex DP must match the nominal component—and cannot be the ku- that we would expect if agreement with the clause were available in every complex DP:

  1. (84)
    figure cf

Similarly, in constructions with a complex DP argument where a clausal argument would be disallowed, ku- agreement is ungrammatical even in subject position:

  1. (85)
    figure cg

On the approach outlined above, the absence of ku- agreement in (84) and (85) is expected because in these situations the DP-shell must have been present from the start, rather than added via last resort. By contrast, the equidistant structure for complex DPs I proposed in Halpert (2012, 2015) does not distinguish between these environments and thus cannot capture these asymmetries. On this approach, we can also take seriously the associative morphology controlled by the nominal component that appears on the CP. As Sabelo (1990) and Halpert (2012) discuss, associate morphology can introduce nominal modifiers; viewing the complex DP construction in Zulu as a case of nominal modification (along the lines of Moulton 2009, 2015), rather than as an appositive, fits with this picture. Since the cases of ku- agreement arise when DP structure is added during the derivation, the fact that associate constructions do not freely permit agreement higher with the modifying element is expected.

  1. (86)
    figure ch

While both the hyper-raising process discussed in Sect. 4 and the complex DP process discussed above have the same logic—T probes a second time after agreeing with a CP—the outcome is different in each type of construction. How can we account for these differences? Crucially, as Hartman (2012) discusses, the last-resort DP shell operation can apply only in instances where a DP argument is possible. As we saw in Sect. 4, raising predicates do not permit DP arguments (when such predicates combine with a DP argument, they receive a different interpretation). Thus the DP shell operation is unavailable in the raising cases:

  1. (87)
    figure ci

We can think of the difference between complex DP subjects and hyper-raised subjects, then, in terms of what happens in between the two probing operations: with complex DPs, the additional DP structure will create a new goal that contains the CP, which results in movement of the entire complex DP. In the hyper-raising cases, no extra structure is added, so when T probes a second time it will find a lower goal inside the CP.

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Halpert, C. Raising, unphased. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 37, 123–165 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-018-9407-2

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