Michelle Yuan
Covert A-movement at the syntax-morphology interface: Insights from Inuktitut incorporation
Speaker
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Michelle Yuan
Michelle Yuan
Michelle Yuan is an Assistant Professor in Linguistics at UC San Diego (PhD from MIT, 2018). Her main areas of research are in syntax and its interfaces, and she is broadly interested in questions pertaining to cross-linguistic variation and language universals. She has investigated topics in case and agreement, ergativity, syntactic movement, and polysynthetic wordhood. She specializes in the grammatical structure of the Inuit dialect continuum, with particular focus on the varieties spoken in Eastern Canada.
Abstract →
Michelle Yuan
Covert A-movement at the syntax-morphology interface: Insights from Inuktitut incorporation
Clear cases of covert A-movement are difficult to identify and seem to be exceedingly rare (Polinsky & Potsdam 2013). However, recent work in the A-bar domain has demonstrated that spell-out patterns of movement copies can be regulated by morphological well-formedness conditions (e.g. Landau 2006, Reintges 2007, Scott 2021). This talk argues that, in the right contexts, this logic can be applied to reveal covert A-movement. The empirical basis of this proposal is Inuktitut (Eastern Canadian Inuit). Due to its polysynthetic nature, Inuktitut provides a unique lens into possible interactions between syntactic movement and complex word-formation.
In particular, Inuktitut has productive incorporation processes that target nouns and embedded clauses alike. Contrary to most previous characterizations of incorporation, this talk argues that incorporated elements in Inuktitut are syntactically active and may undergo various types of A-movement, including object shift, passivization, and even hyperraising. That these extracted elements must surface within the verb complex is analyzed as lower copy spell-out, enforced by morphological requirements on incorporation—essentially a “stray affix” effect. Therefore, this talk puts forth a novel diagnostic of covert A-movement based on a cross-linguistically generalizable interaction, and, more broadly, illustrates the utility of morphologically complex languages in investigating clausal syntax.