In this article, I apply the conditions of Contiguity Theory ( Richards 2016 ) to the problem of pied-piping. I derive the conditions on pied-piping discovered by Cable ( 2007 , 2010a , b ) and account for the connection discovered by Uribe-Etxebarria (2002) between the conditions on wh -in-situ in a given language and the conditions on pied-piping in that language. In the end, as in Cable’s approach, pied-piping dissolves as a phenomenon; the same conditions that determine when overt movement must take place also determine how much material may be pied-piped.

This article presents novel data from the Nilotic language Dinka, in which the syntax of successive-cyclic movement is remarkably transparent. We show that Dinka provides strong support for the view that long-distance extraction proceeds through the edge of every verb phrase and every clause on the path of movement ( Chomsky 1986 , 2000 , 2001 , 2008 ). In addition, long-distance dependencies in Dinka offer evidence that extraction from a CP requires agreement between v and the CP that is extracted from ( Rackowski and Richards 2005 , Den Dikken 2009b , 2012a , b ). The claim that both of these components constrain long-distance movement is important, as much contemporary work on extraction incorporates only one of them. To accommodate this conclusion, we propose a modification of Rackowski and Richards 2005 , in which both intermediate movement and Agree relations between phase heads are necessary steps in establishing a long-distance dependency.

In this article, we examine evidence for the phase theory of movement (Chomsky 2000, 2001) in the context of Tagalog, arguing in particular that Tagalog has overt morphology that signals movement of arguments to checkan EPP-feature on the head of the vP phase. We show that this morphology interacts with extraction in ways Chomsky's theory leads us to expect, and we develop a theory of the Tagalog facts that also accounts for the effects of Huang's (1982) Condition on Extraction Domain.

A number of syntactic theories posit explicit bans on lowering operations. Such bans are largely redundant on cyclic approaches to the syntactic derivation, which can rule out most instances of lowering without an explicit ban. I concentrate here on one instance of lowering not ruled out by the cycle, namely, an Agree relation between a probe and a goal in the probe's own specifier. Facts about Bulgarian wh-movement suggest that operations of this kind are available in principle and that lowering therefore should not be banned.

The syntactic literature discusses a number of phenomena in which a constraint that rules out a certain class of syntactic dependencies fails to rule out structures containing both an ill-formed dependency and a well-formed dependency; well-formed dependencies seem to be able to “help” dependencies that would be ill formed in isolation. In this article I attempt to provide a unified account of these phenomena. I postulate a principle that allows the computational system to “ignore” parts of a syntactic structure that have already been checked with respect to a particular constraint.