Tonal reflexes of movement in Asante Twi

• Published in: Natural language and linguistic theory Vol. 38; no. 3; pp. 827 - 885
• Main Authors: Korsah, Sampson, Murphy, Andrew
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Dordrecht Springer Netherlands 01.08.2020; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Adverbials; Affixes; Linguistics; Natural Language Processing (NLP); Negation; Philosophy of Language; Phonology; Predicate; Relative clauses; Social Sciences; Syntactic movement; Syntactic phases; Verbs; United Kingdom > UK; England; Ghana; Successive-cyclic movement; Movement; Phases; Syntax; Tone
• ISSN: 0167-806X; 1573-0859
• DOI: 10.1007/s11049-019-09456-9

We argue that Asante Twi has a process of tonal overwriting on verbs that are crossed by an A’-dependency. It is shown that this view captures the distribution of the process across ex-situ focus constructions, relative clauses and adverbial clauses, which are all contexts involving operator movement. Furthermore, we illustrate that this process is unbounded and applies to each verb in a long-distance dependency. We therefore conclude that this is a reflex of successive-cyclic movement through v P. Additionally, we provide a detailed study of resumption in Asante Twi, showing that despite island-insensitivity, resumption is still derived by movement. Finally, the morpho-phonological side of the phenomenon is investigated. It is shown that overwriting affects only those affixes below v and not those above, which follows from cyclic Vocabulary Insertion. This provides support for Kandybowicz’ ( 2017 ) assumption that aspect and negation are lower than v P in Asante Twi.