Diagnosing multidominance by focus association of ‘only’

Ka-Fai Yip, Squid Tamar-Mattis

Keywords: multidominance, focus association, only, right node raising, right dislocation, Parallel Merge, syntax, Cantonese

TL;DR: We uncovered a novel diagnostic for multidomaince in RNR and RD, focus association of ‘only’, which requires a c-command relation that is directly generated by Parallel Merge but not movement or ellipsis.

Abstract:

There are several pathways for syntactic structures to be “silent” in the course of derivation: (1a) Copy Deletion,
as licensed by movement chain formation (Nunes 1995); (1b) ellispis, as licensed by LF/syntactic parallelism
with a linguistic antecedent (Merchant 2001); and, sometimes less discussed, (1c) shared/multidominant nodes
as licensed by structural relations created by Parallel Merge (Wilder 1999; Citko 2005; Gračanin-Yuksek 2007).
This study offers a novel diagnostic for (1c), namely, focus association of exclusive particles ‘only’, which
requires a c-command relation that (1a-b) fail to create. We draw cross-linguistic data from English (confirmed
by 9 speakers) and Cantonese [CC] (3 spkrs.) on multidominance in Right Node Raising and Right Dislocation.

Submission Number: 167