UC Santa Cruz

The theoretical goal of this dissertation is to sharpen and refine our understanding of the A-A-bar divide (Postal, 1971; Chomsky, 1977): a distinction which governs the ways that steps of movement and their associated landing sites interact with the wider systems of the syntax and its interfaces. The traditional view takes this divide to reflect a strictly binary cut: positions and steps of attraction are exhaustively classified as either “A” or “A-bar,” and these two labels are picked up by a range of systems across the grammar. But a growing literature recognizes that the division is not so clear-cut: the alignment between A- and A-bar-properties is often imperfect and incomplete, such that apparent steps of A- and A-bar-movements often show properties drawn from the opposite set. The task of this dissertation is thus to address the following questions: (1) Empirically: what are the ways that the classical A- and A-bar-properties can and cannot combine?(2) Theoretically: what mechanisms give rise to apparent A/A-bar misalignments, yielding steps of movements and positions that show properties of both?This dissertation approaches this pair of questions through a series of case studies on Mandar, an Austronesian language of Central Indonesia, drawing on primary fieldwork conducted from 2018 to the present. After an introduction to the language and the methodology of elicitation (Chapter Two), it lays out the basics of clause structure (Chapter Three) and then advances to three theoretical puzzles. The first and second surround the emergence of A-bar-like properties in the A-domain, and their force is to suggest that there are circumstances which allow A-movement to escape the requirement to “target the closest DP:” at the edge of the phase, more specifically, the A-syntax acquires the ability to trigger selective patterns of A-attraction, preferentially targeting pronouns and quantified expressions over more local DPs (Chapter Four), and to attract PPs when the complements of P raise to the edge and must receive Case from external heads like T (Chapter Five). The third puzzle then emerges in the A-bar-domain: in Mandar, several types of subject extraction seem to exceptionally implicate A-movement, rather than the A-bar-movements that draw other elements into the left periphery (Chapter Six), and these effects suggest that the mechanisms that drive A-bar extraction can be parasitically satisfied−in a manner that does not yield mixed A/A-bar attraction−in response to particular patterns of head-bundling along the clausal spine.