2025/05/14 by Matthew Hewett · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Intellectual Property Law
paper · doi:10.16995/star.17274
openalex publication_date 2025/05/14 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/31
This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.This paper reports the following novel generalization: when just one constituent can undergo passive A-movement in English, it is invariably the leftmost accessible passivizable constituent within vP. Such precedence-based intervention effects are wholly unexpected under traditional analyses of intervention based solely on structural prominence or asymmetric c-command (e.g. Relativized Minimality, the Minimal Link Condition, or Attract Closest). 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 are linearly ordered for evaluation and probing delves deeply into internally complex left sisters prior to considering right sisters. Syntactic operations must therefore be able to refer to linear precedence. Alternative conceivable analyses of the attested intervention effects which rely on obligatorily right-branching VPs are shown to be empirically inadequate based on novel evidence from the anti-c-command condition on parasitic gap licensing.