Chapter 6, Introduction/Overview

The final section of Duffield (2007) was concerned with the notion of ‘scope evasion’: the idea that XPs may move to escape a scope-taking element, rather than to check formal features: the key examples of this being quantificational temporal adverbs bao gio ‘what time’ and negative indefinites (under a universal interpretation). This chapter takes this idea further, investigating the (alternative Minimalist) conjecture that all phrasal movement in a morphologically bare language is driven by interpretive requirements (be it in terms of LF requirements or the requirements of ‘Information Structure’, more broadly construed), than by uninterpretable features. Aside from QR-type movements, three types of phrasal movement that require analysis: (i) ‘subject raising’ out of vP (including non-raising in existential constructions); (ii) Topicalization (which, it is argued, includes passivization in Vietnamese, as well as Relative, Cleft, Sentential Subject constructions, and instances of “verb-copying” in Chinese, cf. Huang 1994, Paul 2001): (iii) Heavy NP Shift (right-extraposition). It is proposed—on the basis of internal evidence as well as external comparisons with Celtic (for example, McCloskey 1991, 2001)—that (i) and (ii) are related to a common underlying structure, that Vietnamese matrix clauses are invariably TopPs, and that, like German subject-initial V2 clauses, SVO order reflects a derivation in which subj=topic. It is further claimed that in neither case need there be any resort to ‘uninterpretable features’, including EPP features, to explain phrasal movement. (Rightward movement—(iii)—is treated separately as a processing phenomenon).