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VP-fronting: Movement vs. dislocation

  • Dennis Ott EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: March 22, 2018
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Abstract

While VP-fronting in English has various properties that are generally taken to be hallmarks of A¯-movement, other properties of the construction militate against an analysis in terms of displacement of VP to the clausal periphery. Such an analysis falls short of providing principled answers to the questions of why the trace of VP-fronting must be nominal, why certain kinds of morphological mismatches between the fronted VP and its trace are possible, why fronting of remnant VPs is impossible, and others. This article proposes an analysis of English VP-fronting – plausibly extending to English ’topicalization’ in general – based on the observation that the construction shares these non-movement properties with left-dislocation of VP in German. Connectivity effects, on such an approach, are the result of ellipsis. By assimilating VP-fronting to dislocation, the analysis furnishes principled explanations for the striking asymmetries between English-type VP-fronting (dislocation) and German-type VP-fronting (A¯-movement).

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Jason Merchant, Vera Lee-Schoenfeld, audiences at Concordia University and Carleton University, and the anonymous TLR reviewers for helpful feedback.

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Published Online: 2018-3-22
Published in Print: 2018-6-26

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