Successive cyclicity, anti-locality, and adposition stranding

This thesis studies movement operations in natural languages. It is observed that certain heads—C°, v°, and, in most languages, P°—cannot be stranded; the complements of these heads never move without pied-piping the heads in question. This is surprising since (a) extraction out of CP, vP, and PP is possible in principle and (b) the complement categories of these heads, TP, VP, and DP or PP, are movable. Evidence for the more contentious of these claims is provided in chapters 3 and 4. Chapter 4 also investigates the ramifications of these facts for theories of adposition stranding. All heads in question have independently been argued to project what Chomsky (2000) calls ‘phases’. The generalization is that…