Intermediate branches are not ignored

Finally, consider the issue of intermediate branches. To give a concrete ex-ample, recall the situation in Bulgarian discussed in the last chapter. In this language, there is a contrast in case marking between clitics on the one hand, and strong pronouns and full DPs on the other. Clitics have a dative suffix, as shown in (46a); strong pronouns and other DPs are marked by the com-bination of a preposition and an accusative suffix, as shown in (46b). (The combination of na and accusative taken together acts as a dative.)

(46) a. m-i I-dat

t-i you-dat b. na

to

men-e me-acc

na to

teb-e you-acc

Under the present analysis, clitics in Bulgarian move above D, as shown in (47a). Full DPs can only move above B only, see (47b).

(47) a. Clitics:

DP

m-/t-Dative⇒-i D Genitive

C Accusative B Nominative

A DP

m-/t-/s-b. Strong pronouns: Dative⇒na

D Genitive

C

DP

men-/teb-Accusative⇒-e B Nominative

A DP

men-/teb-The entry for the dative -i is shown in (48):

(48) /-i/ ⇔ Dative D Genitive

C Accusative B Nominative

A

With this background, consider now the fact that it is impossible to suffix the dative -i to strong pronouns (nor other DPs), as shown in (49a). Likewise, it is impossible to prefix this marker, as shown in (49b).

(49) a. *men-i me-dat

*teb-i you-dat b. *i-men

dat-me

*i-teb dat-you

In other words, the entry (48) which spells out all the dative features A-D in (47a) is unable to do so when an XP intervenes between the features, as in (47b).²⁷

This is not something specific to Bulgarian: the account of Blake’s hierar-chy provided in the previous chapter crucially relies on this effect. Recall that the account derives the split between the features expressed by a case suffix and the features expressed by a functional preposition from the assumption that NP* movement targets a position between two of these case features, and thus splits them into two sets, a suffix and a preposition. The proposal would not work if spell out could ignore the position of NP* and package together features which are one higher, and one lower than the final landing site of NP*.

To repeat the conclusion in theoretical terms: intermediate branches can-not be ignored. An XP which intervenes between the features which can be spelled out by an affix, blocks the insertion of that affix, as in (47b). The XP intervener forces each set of features to be spelled out separately, and it ends up flanked by them in the linear string.

A special case of this general setup is a situation where both parts of the tree with an intervener in between are spelled out in an identical way. These situations have been explored by Taraldsen (2009a) and Svenonius (2009).

27Note that I am simplifying here. Under the rigid matching approach, there are two additional steps of movement in (47b). The strong pronoun pied-pipes the accusative across the features C and D, and these features then remnant-move back to the left of the pronoun. This more complex derivation does not, however, change the fact that any constituent which contains all of A, B, C and D, contains also the pronoun, i.e., the pronoun is still an intervener.

As an example, consider the data below (slightly modified from Alexiadou and Gengel 2008), discussed from the perspective of non-terminal spell out by Taraldsen (2009a):

(50) a. (Talking about new books,) I have one (*one).

b. (Talking about books,) I have one new *(one).

(50a) shows that in the context of noun phrase ellipsis (NPE), the numeralone forces the absence of the “pronominal”one. However, if the numeral is followed by an adjective as in (50b), the pronominalone has to be present. Taraldsen (2009a) suggests that one in (50a) spells out at least two projections, A and B, which are separated by the adjective in (50b). The sequence A>AP>B in (50b) is then spelled out as /one/-/adjective/-/one/. Taraldsen follows Alexiadou and Gengel (2008) in equating the lower position with the projection of a classifier, and the higher position with the numeral, drawing also on proposals in Borer (2005).

The crucial question is now what these effects follow from under the two approaches to matching. To make the discussion easier to follow, I will gen-eralize and simplify the two empirical situations into the following abstract scenario, where (51a) is a lexical entry, and (51b) is a syntactic structure. I leave it open what is the label of the node immediately dominating the XP, and I thus use the variableα. In the case of Bulgarian, the label would be BP under standard approaches, and XP would sit in its Spec. In the case of the adjective, opinions vary. Under some approaches, adjectives are in the Spec of a dedicated head (e.g., Cinque 2005), another option is that they are adjoined.

(51) a. An entry: /ab/⇔ AP

A BP

B b. The structure: AP

A αP

XP ...

BP B trace

The empirical data discussed here require that insertion of (51a) under AP is blocked in (51b). What does this follow from?

Under the rigid matching approach, this follows from the fact that (51a) does not match the AP node in (51b). This is because apart from the features A and B, the AP node in (51b) contains in addition the XP, not mentioned in the entry (51a).

Under the relaxed matching theory, the reasoning branches. If there is no spell out for XP, then the explanation for why (51a) cannot spell out (51b) is the same as under the rigid matching approach. However, the interesting examples are those where XP can undergo spell out, and it is thus ignored for further insertion. What this means is that the situation now looks as follows:

(52) a. An Entry: /ab/⇔ AP

A BP

B b. The structure: AP

A αP

BP B ...

We know from the examples above that in this situation, (52a) will not get inserted under AP in (52b). To obtain that result, we must rely on the presence of the additional node αP in the syntactic structure. Thus, it is because of the additional node in (52b), that (52a) cannot be inserted under AP.

The conclusion that the relaxed matching theory has to rely on the pres-ence/absence of non-branching nodes in lexical entries has been reached above also in the case of the Korean suppletive negation. Such nodes are a tool which the relaxed-matching theory needs in order to incorporate the empirically re-quired notion of structural intervention.