Raising in Berber

Abstract

Raising in Berber has been selected for study for two main reasons: firstly, this syntactic operation which has hardly received any attention up to now involves areas which are central to the understanding of the whole syntactic structure of Berber. Secondly, Raising in general is considered by Chomsky and most linguists as being a universal feature of natural languages. However, although Chomsky does not question the existence of Raising to Subject, which he subsumes under the general rule of NP movement, he seems to strongly reject the rule of Raising to Object, claiming that what this rule does can easily be carried out by means of one of his constraints, the "Tensed S Constraint". The goals of the present paper are twofold: the one hand, it aims to show that although Chomsky considers Raising to Subject as an essentially movement rule, this rule seems to operate in Berber without syntactic movement. On the other hand, the paper aims to show that Chomsky's theoretical suggestions in the domain of Raising to Object are highly questionable, if not utterly wrong. A number of arguments supporting these two views are based on Berber data.