by Jason Zentz
To be published in the Proceedings of the 47th Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, April 7-9, 2011.
Beginning with Geis (1970), several authors have provided syntactic, semantic, and etymological arguments for a... more
Beginning with Geis (1970), several authors have provided syntactic, semantic, and etymological arguments for a derivation of adverbial (subordinate) clauses that involves movement of an (often null) operator (see Haegeman 2010a for a review). This paper provides morphological evidence for this view while arguing for separate extraction sites for the moved elements in temporal and conditional clauses.
The Bantu language Akɔɔse (Hedinger 2008) exhibits wh-agreement (see Reintges, LeSourd, & Chung 2006 for a typology); that is, it marks its verbs with respect to whether an element has been extracted to the left periphery. This extraction marking occurs not only in canonical wh-movement contexts (Chomsky 1977), such as constituent questions, relative clauses, cleft questions, and topicalization, but also in temporal and conditional adverbial clauses.
Crucially, Akɔɔse wh-agreement encodes whether the extracted element originated above or below v. The distribution of wh-agreement morphology shows that the operator in central conditional clauses is extracted from a position above v (supporting Haegeman's (2010b) claim), the moved element
in central temporal clauses originates below v (supporting Larson's (1987, 1990) position), and there is no extraction in peripheral adverbial clauses (as argued in Haegeman 2007).
Wh-agreement provides compelling evidence for a movement analysis for both temporal and conditional central adverbial clauses. Due to its sensitivity to height of extraction, Akɔɔse lends insight into the question of where the moved elements originate, unlike languages like Irish (McCloskey 2001) where wh-agreement only registers the presence of movement.
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