Wolof wh-movement at the syntax-morphology interface

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the seemingly complex morphosyntax of \(\mathrm{A}'\)-movement in the Niger-Congo language Wolof. Wolof exhibits three different \(\mathrm{A}'\)-extraction effects: morphological marking of the cyclicity of movement, agreement in class between the wh-complementizer and the extracted phrase, and a subject/non-subject asymmetry, akin to the that-trace effect. The effects seem to surface in two seemingly different structural configurations, with their distribution not straightforwardly explainable as being of semantic of information-structural provenance. The analysis developed here advocates a unified syntax for all \(\mathrm{A}'\)-structures in Wolof, and aims to show that their surface morpho-syntactic properties can be understood as resulting from the general mechanisms underlying the operation Agree, such as the presence of particular uninterpretable features and their location, and the interaction of agreement with post-syntactic processes, specifically an OCP-type effect, akin to the Doubly-Filled-COMP Filter, resulting in post-syntactic impoverishment and complementizer allomorphy. This paper offers not only a unified analysis of \(\mathrm{A}'\)-extraction effects and maintains a unified syntax of \(\mathrm{A}'\)-extraction in Wolof, but crucially offers a principled account for the distribution of different shapes of the CP-layer in different instances of \(\mathrm{A}'\)-movement in Wolof.