Locality, focus and covert movement

This paper offers new evidence for covert focus movement in two areas of Chinese syntax, concerning A’-extraction and the distribution of anaphoric definite bare nouns. A left-right asymmetry in Mandarin topic and relative structures has long been observed (since Huang in Linguistic Inquiry 15: 531–574, 1984) whereby apparent extraction from an island is possible if the island occurs as a subject or fronted object, but not if it occurs postverbally. The definite interpretation of a bare noun exhibits a similar asymmetry (Jenks in Linguistic Inquiry 49:501–536, 2018): a bare noun may have anaphoric definite interpretation if occurring as a subject or topic, but not as a postverbal object. In both patterns, the occurrence of focus may exceptionally cancel the asymmetry, allowing extraction from a postverbal island and the anaphoric definite interpretation of a postverbal bare noun. We argue that these patterns of exception are explained if the phrases associated with focus undergo covert movement in LF.