Right dislocation and raising-to-object in Zulu

Claire Halpert; Jochen Zeller

doi:10.1515/tlr-2014-0029

Article

Right dislocation and raising-to-object in Zulu

Claire Halpert and Jochen Zeller

Published/Copyright: September 9, 2015

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From the journal The Linguistic Review Volume 32 Issue 3

Abstract

In this paper, we analyze an unusual type of right dislocation in Zulu. We demonstrate that the construction in question combines A-movement of a DP out of an embedded finite CP into a matrix argument position (raising-to-object; RtO) with right dislocation of both the raised DP and the clause out of which it raises. The existence of such a construction is noteworthy for several reasons. First, the conclusion that Zulu allows A-movement out of a finite CP is at odds with standard Minimalist analyses of raising and also with the alternative analysis of RtO from finite clauses proposed in Bruening (2001, 2002). Second, on our proposed analysis, RtO can take place out of a CP-complement, which is subsequently dislocated and adjoined to a maximal projection, supporting Büring and Hartmann (1997), who argue that movement from an extraposed CP happens before CP-dislocation. Our findings thus provide a strong argument for a movement analysis of CP-extraposition. We finally conclude that these constructions present a number of complications for recent analyses of right dislocation as leftward movement plus clausal ellipsis (Ott and de Vries 2014, and Ott and de Vries (in press)), due to the interaction between A-movement and dislocation and the word order resulting from CP-extraposition.

Keywords: raising-to-object; right dislocation; CP-extraposition; Bantu languages

Acknowledgment

We are grateful to Mthuli Percival Buthelezi and Monwabisi Mhlophe for sharing their Zulu grammaticality judgments with us. Thanks go as well to Dennis Ott, the audience at Bantu 5, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback and suggestions.

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Published Online: 2015-9-9

Published in Print: 2015-9-1

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https://doi.org/10.1515/tlr-2014-0029

Keywords for this article

raising-to-object; right dislocation; CP-extraposition; Bantu languages