Cross-clausal movement and its limits
Line Hove Mikkelsen, Ellen Thrane, Grethe Schmidt
June 2025 

Constraints on movement are of central concern to syntactic theory. Recent work has focused on the relationship between the height of the landing site and locality restrictions. Keine (2020) argues that the higher the landing site the fewer locality restrictions are imposed on the movement (``higher is freer"). In contrast Deal (2017) argues that a lower landing site can lead to movement being less restricted due to Delayed Opacity, i.e. ``lower is freer". In this paper, I show that neither analysis makes the right predictions for movement out of finite clauses in Kalaallisut (Inuit, Greeland). I argue that, in Kalaallisut, it is not the height of the landing site that determines whether movement across a finite clause boundary is possible, rather it is the nature of the features driving the movement. In particular, phi-probing unlocks the embedded CP allowing for extraction from within. Focus probing does not, which accounts for the clause-bounded nature of focus fronting. In addition to deriving the differing locality profiles of hyperraising and focus fronting, the analysis of focus fronting generalizes to wh-movement and also accounts for apparent long-distance focus movement. The final segment of the paper situates the Kalaallisut pattern in a preliminary cross-linguistic typology of height-locality correlations.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/009058 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Under review
keywords:	phase unlocking, hyperraising, focus movement, locality, height-locality connection, inuit, syntax
previous versions:	v1 [June 2025]
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