On hyper-raising in Mandarin Chinese

Abstract The goal of this paper is threefold. First, it addresses the long-standing controversy regarding the derivation of phrasal displacement in the raising modal construction in Mandarin Chinese (Lin and Tang in Bull Inst Hist Philos 66:53–105, 1995; Lin in Syntax 14:48–73, 2011; Hu and Chen in Stud Chin Linguist 43(1):39–71, 2022). Drawing on Law and Pan’s (Int J Chin Linguist 10(1):1–43, 2023) diagnostic tests involving compatibility with wh -questions and interference with relativization, I demonstrate that while object raising in this construction involves topicalization targeting the left periphery, subject raising exemplifies hyper-raising (i.e., A-movement from the subject position out of a finite CP; see Ura in Varieties of raising and the feature-based bare phrase structure theory (MIT Occasional Papers in Linguistics 7), MIT, Cambridge, 1994; Deal in: Lamont and Tetzloff (eds) Proceedings of the 47th annual meeting of the North East Linguistic Society (NELS 47), GLSA, Amherst, 2017; and Zyman in Annu Rev Linguist 9:29–48, 2023). Second, I propose that hyper-raising in this construction can be derived by assuming two key hypotheses: (i) Chomsky’s (Kenstowicz (ed) A life in language, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2001) Phase Impenetrability Condition, and (ii) that the raising modal keneng ‘may; likely’ bears a D-probe. Third, I argue that the impossibility of super-raising in this construction follows from Branan’s (Linguist Inq 54(1):1–38, 2023) Principle of Conflicting Requirements, which operates in tandem with the anti-locality constraint (cf. Erlewine in Nat Lang Linguist Theory 34:429–479, 2016, Glossa J Gen Linguist 5(1):84, 2020; Deal in Linguist Inq 50:388–415, 2019). I further show that this anti-locality constraint plays a crucial role in deriving the Ā-opacity effect in internal topicalization in Mandarin Chinese (cf. Rezac in Syntax 6:156–182, 2003; Obata and Epstein in Syntax 14(2):122–147, 2011).