The precedence component to intervention effects: Evidence from English passives

This talk substantiates and provides an account of the following novel generalization:

(1) When just one constituent can undergo passive A-movement in English, it is invariably the leftmost accessible passivizable constituent within vP.

I argue that (1) indicates that English passive A-movement exhibits precedence-based intervention. Precedence-based intervention is wholly unexpected under traditional analyses of intervention based solely on structural prominence determined via asymmetric c-command (e.g. the Minimal Link Condition (Chomsky 1995) or Attract Closest (Pesetsky 2000)). Instead, I argue that precedence-based intervention is derivable from procedural aspects of the search algorithm initiated by internal Merge–triggering probes. Specifically, sisters within the search domain of the probe are linearly ordered for evaluation and probing delves deeply into internally complex left sisters prior to considering right sisters. A major conclusion is that linear precedence relations must be visible during the syntactic computation (see also Fukui 2001; Kayne 2011, 2022; Zwart 2011; Bruening 2014, 2018). Alternative conceivable analyses of the attested left-to-right intervention effects which rely on obligatorily right-branching (i.e. descending) verb phrases are shown to be empirically inadequate based on evidence from constituency tests (namely, do so–anaphora and VP-ellipsis) and the anti-c-command condition on parasitic gap licensing. Indeed, parasitic gap licensing reveals the need for a non-c-command–based account of binding and licensing asymmetries within vP, building on Bruening (2014), a.o. I conclude by considering the role that precedence might play elsewhere in syntax, for instance in intervention with Ā-movement.