The Syntax of Wh-Subjects and Relativized Subjects in English

초록

This paper investigates the syntax of wh-subjects and relativized subjects in English, building on and refining Bošković’s (2024) proposal that local wh-subjects move to a mixed A/A’ position, SpecA/A’P, within the EPP domain. While Bošković’s (2024) system captures several long-standing asymmetries between subject and non-subject wh-movement, we show that it leaves certain empirical patterns unaccounted for, including extraction asymmetries out of wh-islands and the possibility of aggressively non-D-linked wh-phrases in the embedded domain. We argue that these patterns naturally follow because the A/A’ head can be selected by an interrogative C, even without the wh-subject moving to SpecCP. Extending this proposal to relative clauses, we argue that relativized subjects also move to SpecA/AP, establishing the identical structural dependency between the A/A’ head and the relative clause head C. This unified analysis accounts for the shared properties of wh-subjects and relativized subjects, with the consequence that anti-that-trace effects are orthogonal to syntactic locality constraints.

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