Rebecca Shields (colloquium abstract)

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Minimal Domains Revisited

Rebecca Shields
University of Wisconsin-Madison

ABSTRACT

Chomsky (1993/1995) argued on the basis of certain Scandinavian Object Shift facts that the locality condition Shortest Move/Attract Closest is mitigated by the notion of Minimal Domain. Under this proposal, locality conditions do not hold within the confines of the Minimal Domain, in which movement is free. Locality conditions constrain movement only when movement extends beyond the Minimal Domain. However, Holmberg (1999) discusses counterexamples to Chomsky's analysis: cases where movement is within the Minimal Domain, but where locality effects nevertheless surface. Both Holmberg (1999) and Fox & Pesetsky (2005) develop (entirely different) accounts of the Object Shift phenomenon which are devoid of any type of Minimal Domain "escape hatch" or its analogue. Such theories would appear to have the advantage, since a model in which locality is generally defined is obviously simpler than one in which locality conditions are bifurcated across different domains. However, in this paper I argue that Chomsky (1993) was in fact (partly) correct: a Minimal Domain escape hatch does indeed seem to exist. The argument is empirical, and is based on new data involving Adverb scrambling in Russian, Japanese, and Korean. These data clearly show that movement within a certain extremely local domain is free, while further movement is subject to the expected locality constraints. However, in order to correctly capture the facts certain revisions to Chomsky's original definition of Minimal Domain are required. The proposed analysis derives both the new Adverb scrambling facts, and the apparently problematic Scandinavian Object Shift paradigm pointed out by Holmberg.