| I support an analysis of specificity effects by demonstrating the movement of specific objects to a node in the clausal structure, Aspect Phrase (strongly related to specificity), the Subjacency effects caused, and the Weak Crossover (WCO) effects lost as a result of such movement.;I unify previous accounts of pre-Spell-Out specificity effects such as Who did you see [(??the) pictures of t] (Mahajan 1992), with explanations of LF effects, such as the "inversely linked" DP in I like [the pictures of everyone ] (Fiengo and Higginbotham 1981).;Due to the morphological analyzability of a certain set of English indefinites and quantifiers such as everyone/-body, something, nowhere, anytime, or Analyzable Raising Operator Expressions, AROEs (excluding wh-phrases), I argue that their pure operators can raise out of them, following Watanabe (1992a, 199b) for Japanese. This analysis will explain specificity effects in terms of Subjacency violations in English, Chinese and Italian. Neither *We didn't see the women from anywhere, nor *Everyone, I've heard few stories about, have available distributive readings for the AROEs. The pure (quantificational) operators in these words raises to Spec, AspP and violates Subjacency.;The appositive relatives, restrictive relatives, adjective-complement constructions, parasitic gap constructions, topicalizations, scrambling, clefts, and D-linked wh-phrases that involve objects will void WCO, since they raise to Spec, AspP, due to their specificity. In turn, their traces in Spec, AspP provide a "closer binder" for the trace and pronominal, and remedy the WCO effect.;Specificity effects appear in negative polarity licensing. In * You don't have the friend who does anything, say, the DP the friend will raise to Spec, AspP. If we take Negative Polarity licensing as a type of operator raising or feature-matching, the negative polarity phrase anything will be unable to get out of the non-L-marked DP.;Externally headed relative clauses in Chinese, Japanese and Korean (for example Nega [[muas-il humcvhi-n] saram-I cvap-niinya? 'I caught a man that stole what?') exhibit specificity effects. When the wh-phrase moves, it does so from a specific DP that has moved to Spec, AspP (*Nega [[muas-il humcvhi-n] ki saram-i cvap-niinya? 'I caught that man that stole what?'). |
