Hyperraising, evidentiality, and phase deactivation
Tommy Tsz-Ming Lee, Ka-Fai Yip
August 2023
 

This paper investigates an interaction between locality requirements and syntactic dependencies through the lens of hyperraising constructions in Cantonese and Vietnamese. We offer a novel piece of evidence from subject displacement in support of the claim that phasehood can be deactivated by syntactic dependencies during the derivation. We show that (i) hyperraising (to subject) constructions are attested in both languages, and that (ii) only attitude verbs that encode an indirect evidential component allow hyperraising constructions. We propose a phase deactivation account for hyperraising, where the phasehood of a CP is deactivated by an Agree relation in terms of an evidential feature with the embedding verb. The findings of this paper suggest that locality requirements in natural languages are less rigid than previously thought, and that there is a non-trivial semantic dimension to hyperraising phenomena.
Format: [ pdf ]
Reference: lingbuzz/006471
(please use that when you cite this article)
Published in: To appear in Natural Language & Linguistic Theory
keywords: hyperraising, attitude verbs, evidentiality, locality, phase, agree, cantonese, vietnamese, syntax
previous versions: v2 [June 2023]
v1 [February 2022]
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