Genitive subject licensing in Uyghur subordinate clauses

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. July 30, 2011. — 15 p. In Proceedings of WAFL VII . MITWPL, October 29-31, 2010.In this paper, we analyze certain embedded clauses in Uyghur, a Turkic language spoken in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China. We argue i) that genitive case on the subjects of these clauses is licensed by agreement with a clause-external head, and ii) that these clauses are full CPs. Putting these two claims together, we have evidence that Uyghur exhibits agreement and case-assignment over a CP boundary, a configuration that is incompatible with Chomsky’s (1998) strong version of the Phase Impenetrability Condition (PIC). We conclude that the Uyghur data support adopting the weaker version of the PIC proposed by Chomsky (2001).