On Sabbagh’s (2007) Generalizations on Rightward Movement and Right Node Raising

Abstract

Chung, Daeho. 2009. On Sabbagh’s (2007) Generalizations on Rightward Movement and Right Node Raising. Linguistic Research 26(1), 125-140. Sabbagh (2007) claims: (i) the pivot in the right node raising construction (RNR) first moves to the rightmost position in each conjunct of a coordinate structure, unless it is already there, before it moves to the surface position; (ii) the first step of pivot movement, as an instance of rightward movement, is subject to the same locality restriction that applies to rightward movement in general. This review article shows that the first claim is not empirically supported and that the second claim, i.e., the parallelism between rightward movement and RNR, is not guaranteed, either, because his generalization on rightward movement itself turns out to be incorrect. It will be also shown that any version of ATB-rightward movement approach to RNR leads to an LCA problem, even with Kasai's (2008) LCA-abiding treatment of rightward movement. (Hanyang University)