Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine (mitcho), National University of Singapore, will present “Bikol clefts and topics and the Austronesian extraction restriction” (joint work with Cheryl Lim) in the Linguistics colloquium series at 3:30 Friday February 28. An abstract follows. All are welcome!

Many Austronesian languages exhibit an extraction restriction whereby only one particular DP — the “pivot” argument, the choice of which is re?ected by morphology on the verb — can be A’-extracted. We show that such extraction restrictions can vary between di?erent A’-constructions in Bikol: local clefting is limited to the pivot, whereas topicalization can target pivots and non-pivot agents, but not other non-pivot DPs. Following the phase-theoretic, locality-based approach to such extraction asymmetries in related Austronesian languages, we propose that clefting and topicalization di?er in the featural speci?cations of their probes, but must always attract their closest matching goal. Evidence for this approach comes from interactions between clefting, topicalization, and hanging topic left dislocation in long-distance con?gurations. Such data motivates the view that the classic Austronesian pivot-only extraction restriction is best characterized in terms of syntactic locality, rather than as a restriction on the grammatical function or morphological case of movement targets.