Conditional clauses,main clause phenomena and the syntax of polarity emphasis Universiteit Gent
This paper addresses two properties of conditional clauses: (i) their incompatibility with Main Clause Phenomena (MCP), exemplified by English argument fronting, and (ii) the unavailability of Speaker Oriented Adverbs (Ernst 2009) (SpOAs). The paper elaborates the hypothesis (Bhatt & Pancheva 2002, 2006) that conditionals are derived by operator movement: the absence of MCP then follows from locality conditions. Adopting the cartographic ...