On projection and the shadow of [wh]

Much work on syntactic locality has shown that processes like wh-movement are subject to several kinds of locality restrictions. In addition to being sensitive to intervening wh-phrases, wh-movement must proceed successive cyclically through various points in the clause, and in some cases/languages, may not cross intervening arguments (see e.g. Branan and Erlewine (2022) for a recent overview).

In this talk, I propose that these locality restrictions are interconnected. More specifically, I suggest that they reduce to a particular view of how selection influences the projection of category information from daughter nodes to their mothers (following Zeijlstra 2020). I show that by examining the nature of selection and projection, we can leverage the architecture of grammar to predict the requirement for wh-movement to be successive-cyclic: the projection rule makes it so that wh-phrases create their own barriers for extraction if their wh-features get too high, meaning they have to move outside the scope of their own features in order to extract. The theory entails that movement must be successive cyclic, but does not say through which positions. By varying the different allowed parameters in this theory, I show that it also captures the variable the sensitivity of wh-movement to intervening arguments.

Elise Newman is an assistant professor at MIT. She works primarily on syntax, with additional interests in semantics/pragmatics and first language acquisition. She finished her PhD at MIT in 2021, and then worked as a postdoc at the University of Edinburgh, where she collaborated with researchers from Edinburgh, Goettingen, and Stony Brook on a project about syntactic locality effects.