Cyclicity and Locality

Cyclicity is hypothesized to be a fundamental property of all syntactic derivations. There is periodicity to how syntactic operations are applied, i.e., syntactic rules apply bottom-up in cycles which are ordered with respect to each other. For example, agreement between I and am in Nadya believes [that I am covered in ivy leaves] must occur before I am covered in ivy leaves combines with that, which in turn must occur before [that I am covered in ivy leaves] combines with believe, and so on. A big question for the syntactic theory is what exactly is the notion of cyclicity that governs application of syntactic rules, and what role does it play in explaining locality of syntactic dependencies. In my work, I approach this question with special attention to how syntax and semantics of clausal embedding affect locality, arguing that both the structural differences at edges of embedded clauses and their external syntax affect possibility of extraction out of them. Currently my work in this domain focuses on selective opacity: I am interested in why the same syntactic constituent could be opaque to some syntactic dependencies but transparent to others, and how the intuition that movement is constrained by the functional sequence ('’The Level Embedding Approach’‘) could be worked out and married with our theories of clausal embedding.