The yes-no question clitic li placement in Russian.
E. Rudnitskaya
 
     I consider the enclitic li 1W[ord] placement in yes-no questions in
Russian, as in (1). Russian allows only 1W placement but not 1C[onstituent]
placement (cf. Serbo-Croatian). I propose a two-step derivation of 1W questions
which consists of syntactic movements alone (cf. Progovac (1996) and Boshkovic
(1998)). Li is base-generated in C. First, the constituent which contains the
focus of the question fronts to SpecXP (see (2)); second, the focus moves to
SpecCP, which is the position for the focus of a yes-no question, attracted by
the [+FOCUS] feature in C, following King (1994) - see (3).
(1)   A/ninu    li  knigu   on     prines  t1? [A/ninu is marked with a
 Ann's-A   li  book-A  he-N   brought t1  contrastive stress]
 "Is it Ann's book that he brought?" [or Mary's book]
(2)[CP[C'[C li [+FOCUS]]][SpecXP[DP1 Aninu knigu] [X'[X ]] [TP on prines t1]]]
(3)[CP[AP2 Aninu] [C'[C li ]][SpecXP [DP1 t2 knigu] [X'[X ]][TP on prines t1]]]
The evidence for the above derivation and against the Prosodic Inversion (PI)
derivation proposed by Halpern (1992) is the following:
     A) examples such as (4) cannot be derived via PI:
(4) [DP2 Mikroso/fta]     li  [DP1  produkciju  t2]  vy    reklamiruete  t1?
    [DP2 Microsoft-G]     li  [DP1 products-A   t2]  you-N advertise     t1
"Is it products of Microsoft that you are advertising?" [or of another company]
     B) Other material besides a clitic can intervene between the clitic host
(the focus) and the rest of the remnant DP/PP, even if the remnant DP/PP is
fronted:
(5) [AP2  A/ninu]     li       Petr    [DP1 t2 knigu]    dal   t1  mal'chiku?
     [AP2 Ann's-A]    li       Peter-N [DP1 t2 book-A]   gave  t1  boy-D
"Is it Ann's book that John gave to the boy?" [or Mary's book]
(6) [DP2 Mikroso/fta]       li   vy    reklamiruete [DP1 produkciju t2]?
    [DP2 Microsoft-G]       li   you-N advertise    [DP1 products-A  t2]
"Is it products of Microsoft that you are advertising?" [or of another company]
     C) Split fronting to SpecCP in li questions is similar to split wh-
movement rather than to split scrambling. First, it can be successive-cyclic,
unlike scrambling (cf. Sekerina (1997)); second, it is less restricted than
scrambling but as restricted as wh-movement in some environments; third, it is
similar to examples of "topicalization" in Chomsky (1977) (cf. the English
translations). This is evidence that the landing site of the focus movement is
SpecCP.
     In order to provide a syntactic derivation of a ne...li question, such as
(7), which is essentially synonymous to a li question, it is necessary to
assume that ne and Aninu are a constituent (that ne is constituent negation,
and [ne Aninu] moves to SpecCP) - cf. the proposal of King (1994) that when a
verb is the focus in a ne...li question, ne moves to C via head movement
together with the V head.
(7) [DP2  Ne  A/ninu]  li [DP1 t2  knigu]   on    prines  t1?
    [DP2  not Ann's-A  li [DP1 t2  book-A]  he-N  brought t1
"Is it Ann's book that he brought?" [or Mary's book]
     The remaining problem is the derivation of questions in which the whole
fronted DP/PP is the focus, as in (8). In (8), Aninu cannot be fronted to
SpecCP by itself, because it is not the focus of the question. Then, PI or
another phonological operation is necessary to derive (8).
(8) [DP1 Aninu   li sestru]   on  vstretil t1? [no contrastive stress on Aninu]
    [DP1 Ann's-A li sister-A] he-N   met   t1
"Is it Ann's sister that he met?" [or a woman who looks like Ann's sister]
     Thus, the derivation of questions with a one-word focus is proved to
consist of syntactic movements only. However, if the focus consists of more
than one word, an additional phonological operation is necessary.
 

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