Relative clauses in Moksha: Raising by reprojection

Abstract

This paper presents novel data on relative clauses with inverse case attraction in Moksha Mordvin. This is a rare type of externally-headed relative clauses where the head noun bears case assigned inside the relative clause (see Bianchi 1999, 2000b, Kholodilova 2013, Deal 2016, Wood et al. 2017, Abramovitz 2021). On the basis of a correlation between a case marking on the head noun and reconstruction effects (idioms, anaphor binding, condition C), I argue that raising derivation of relative clauses is a part of natural language syntax (Schachter 1973, Vergnaud 1974, Kayne 1994, de Vries 2002, Sportiche 2017, i.a.) and that it co-exists with the head-external derivation (cf. Sauerland 1998, 2003, Bhatt 2002, Harris 2008, Jarvis 2025 for co-existence of several relative clause derivations). The paper then proposes a novel implementation of the raising derivation, according to which the head NP projects upon its movement to the main clause. Such projecting movement follows from projection-by-selection approach to labeling (Chomsky 1995, Stabler 1997, Adger 2003) combined with the possibility of upward search (Baker 2008, Zeijlstra 2012).