Against Anti-Locality in A’-Movement

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to declare that anti-locality based on the Spec-to-Spec Anti-Locality (SSAL) is not effective in accounting for that-trace effects. It is illustrated that there are many pieces of conceptual and empirical evidence against the SSAL. Accordingly, the anti-locality account for that-trace effects cannot be accepted. This paper proposes that what is crucial in alleviating that-trace effects is the property of intervening elements between CP and TP, not just the SSAL. Unfortunately this paper does not provide a comprehensive account covering all the examples regarding the adverb effect, topic islands, and fronted focus elements. With a simple conclusion that the anti-locality approach can never account for that-trace effects, we are looking forward to an analysis attributing a difference in the property of intervening elements between CP and TP to a structural difference based on a refined CP structure.