While reading the Rizzi articles, you will come across a couple of things that you probably aren’t familiar with, although the papers assume that you are. Let me just add a couple of notes here concerning things that I’ve been asked about over email. I may add further notes of this sort as I get further emails.

1. What’s the deal with topic and focus?

There’s an overview article (de Swart & de Hoop 1995) that is pretty accessible. No need to read all of it, but if you’re feeling totally lost and want to have something to look at, that might be worth taking a look at. It’s listed among the related readings on the readings page for the coming week.

Topic and focus pertain to how a sentence fits into the surrounding discourse. A sentence may have a topic, and a sentence may (some say must) have a focus. The topic situates the sentence with respect to the discourse that has come before, and the focus marks new information being added to the discourse by the sentence. That is: topic is “old information” and focus is “new information.”

Languages will sometimes mark topics and foci using syntactic movement. Hungarian is famous for doing this. Catalan also does something like this. In general, when topics and foci move around, the topic seems to come first, followed by the focus, and then the rest of the sentence. Rizzi is concerned with these syntactic movements, particularly the landing sites for these movements and the properties of the movements. Are these movements like wh-movement? Do they land in the same place wh-words do? (Do they compete for the same position if you had both in a sentence?)

For the purposes of reading the article, you can probably think of topics and foci as being fairly analogous to wh-words. You mark something in the sentence as being a “topic” or as being a “focus” (like you would mark something as being a “wh-phrase”) and then a syntactic operation moves the marked thing up the tree.

In Rizzi’s interpretation of these things, the syntactic position that something appears in actually feeds the interpretation in some meaningful way. So, if you have something in the place where topics go, it will be interpreted as a topic. Things that are not in a topic position are not interpreted as topics. Same for foci, they need to be in a focus position in order to be interpreted as a focus. (And, indeed, for wh-words as well; in order to be interpreted as a wh-word, it needs to be where wh-words are expected to be.) So, Rizzi has set up a number of designated positions in the clause structure for each of these functions.

2. What’s weak crossover?

Some of you will have seen this before, and some of you will not have. The basic phenomenon of weak crossover is always illustrated by the following sentence:

*Who does his mother love?

The point about this sentence is that his cannot be coreferential with who. That is, it can’t mean “Whose mother loves him?” There’s no problem with such an interpretation in a sentence like “Who loves his mother?” so there is something to be explained. Although people haven’t really settled on a deep explanation for this, the problem appears to be that we are moving who over the position occupied by his. His is a bound pronoun in this situation, coindexed with who (in order to get the covarying interpretation), and a weak crossover violation refers to the situation where you move something over something it is coindexed with. (It’s called “weak” because it doesn’t always lead to crashingly horrible sentences, and also because not everybody finds them bad. There is also “strong crossover” which is worse: *Who does he love? on the interpretation “Who loves himself?” is an example. In the weak crossover cases, the coindexed pronoun does not directly c-command the trace of the movement, but in strong crossover cases, it does.)

This affects various kinds of movement. Not just wh-movement. Quantifiers, for example, seem to show a similar effect, even though they re not visibly moving.

*His mother loves every boy.

This is no good on the interpretation that “Every boy’s mother loves him” and the reason would seem to be that every boy needs to (covertly) move past his for interpretation. This serves as evidence that QR involves movement.

Similar facts can be observed about focus too.

*His mother loves JOHN (not Bill).

This can’t really mean “JOHN’s (not Bill’s) mother loves him.” This has often been taken as evidence that focus needs to move (covertly in English, but maybe visibly in Hungarian) as well. You can tell it has to move because if you put a coindexed pronoun in the way, the sentence is not good.

3. What’s an operator? (e.g., “wh-operator” or “relative operator” or “null operator”)

An “operator” is generally something that has some kind of quantificational meaning, but specifically here it is something that has to move as part of its interpretation. Quantifiers bind variables (which can be either the trace they leave behind when moving, or a pronoun). So, quantifiers like everyone are operators, wh-words are operators. In the formation of relative clauses, most people assume that there is a silent operator (the “null operator”), acting essentially like a wh-word. This is sometimes called “Op“. As in “the book [Op that I read t]”, where Op has moved like a wh-word would to the top of the [Op that I read t] clause.

4. What’s the difference between A and A-bar?

“A” here stands for “argument” and “A-bar” stands for “not an argument.” There is too much here to say, I think, but generally when you move an operator in order to bind its trace, that movement is A-bar movement. A movement is pretty much exclusively for movement for case or movement to subject position. A-bar movement (movement of an operator) is the kind of movement that seems to trigger weak crossover, among other things. A movement (for example, subject raising in “John seems to himself to be something of a genius” or “John is likely to seem to himself to be the best singer in the room”, where John moves from a lower subject position to a higher one) does not seem to trigger weak crossover.

The A/A-bar distinction is applied not only to movements but also to landing sites. There are places where A-movement can land, and those are A-positions, and places where A-bar-movement can land, and those are A-bar-positions. SpecCP is an A-bar position. SpecIP is generally an A-position.

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Ok, that’s a little bit to get you started, in case you were running into a brick wall as you were reading this. If you have other questions, though, feel free to email them to me.