Locality and Linearization: The Case of Kinande

Abstract

Holmberg and Hróarsdóttir (2003) present facts about conditions on raising in Icelandic which led Hiraiwa (2005) and Chomsky (2005) to posit a new version of the cycle. The relevant Icelandic facts involve a raising construction which is blocked by an intervening experiencer, unless the experiencer undergoes wh-movement; the puzzle had to do with how wh-movement could improve the status of a raising operation, given that raising would have to precede wh-movement in the derivation on standard approaches to the cycle. I consider data from Kinande, a Bantu language of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which are formally similar to the Icelandic data discussed by Holmberg and Hróarsdóttir. We will see evidence that the Kinande data should not be accounted for in terms of locality at all; rather, they are instances of Distinctness, a ban on structurally adjacent nodes with the same label (Richards 2001, to appear). If this account can be generalized to Icelandic, then our approach to the cycle can be simplified.