We describe a study of syntactic intervention administered to a 12;2 year old individual with syntactic SLI, who had difficulties in the comprehension and production of structures containing syntactic movement such as relative clauses, object questions, focalization sentences and sentences with verb movement. The intervention, comprised of 16 sessions, was based on syntactic theory and included explicit teaching of syntactic movement, relying on a type of syntactic knowledge that was intact – the argument structure of the verb. The participant’s performance was assessed before and after treatment, and for some of the tests also during the treatment and 10 month following its completion. The performance was assessed using various tasks that targeted comprehension, repetition and elicitation of semantically reversible sentences. Following treatment, the participant’s performance on all structures with syntactic movement showed substantial improvement compared to baseline, in many of the tasks reaching the performance of the age-matched control group. Treatment of phrasal movement resulted not only in improvement in treated structures, but also in generalization to untrained structures: although phrasal movement was only treated directly for relative clauses and focalization structures, the comprehension of object Wh questions, which also include phrasal movement, improved as well. The high performance level was maintained 10 months after the treatment.

This paper is an attempt to recast the connectedness condition (Kayne 1983) in derivational terms: we will show that a Top-Down derivation is adequate to describe strong island conditions (as in Huang’s original proposal), without loosing the ability to discriminate among distinct phenomena (preverbal subject islandhood, complex-NP constraint, special properties of the first argument in double object constructions, intermediate status w.r.t. extraction/ gapping, for right adjuncts), and predicting, moreover, the grammatical distribution of parasitic/licensed gaps in the derived structure.

In this paper we reconsider the connectedness effect discussed by Kayne (1983), and illustrated in the examples (1)-(3). Kayne observed that in VO languages, left branch constituents are strong islands for extraction; 1 however, an illegitimate gap inside a left branch island can be rescued by another gap embedded in a lower right branch constituent. The examples in (1)-(2) illustrate preverbal subject islands, and (3) a small clause subject island: while in the (a) examples, extraction from the left-branch subject is impossible, in the (b) examples, the illegitimate gap is followed by a legitimate gap on a right branch and this creates a grammatical configuration. (1) a. *[Which famous playwright]i did [close friends of ei] become famous? b.? [Which famous playwright]i did [close friends of ei] admire ei? (2) a. *Who did [my talking to ei] bother Hilary? b. √ Who did [my talking to ei] bother ei? (3) a. *Whoi did you consider [friends of ei] angry at Sandy? b. √ Whoi did you consider [ friends of ei] angry at ei? Kayne (1983) proposed a representational constraint to account for these data, the Connectedness Condition (henceforth CC). The central notion is that of a g-projection, which is defined in (4)-(5). In a VO language like English, every right branch is in a canonical government configuration, by definition (4); the recursive definition in (5) ensures that all the maximal projections dominating a structural governor X and lying on a right branch are g-projections of X.

There are two fundamentally divergent approaches to ellipsis: a) those that assume that

This paper addresses the verification of the structural positions for variety of nominative determiner phrases (DPs) in Japanese. There have been many proposals on the subject positions in Japanese, but the analyses conducted in this paper show that the subject DPs staying in Spec v is both theoretically and empirically plausible. It is further argued that while the agentive subjects occupy Spec v position, the non-agentive subjects are located in the lower VP. Possible consequences of the proposals are shown, based on Cyclic Linearization (Fox and Pesetsky 2005) and vP coordination in Japanese. *I would like to thank Barbara Citko for giving me valuable comments on the earlier version of this paper. Thanks also to Dan McCloy who proofread the manuscript and gave me various suggestions, which led to a significant improvement. I am solely responsible for any remaining errors or inadequacies. 3 1.