For many English speakers, A-bar movement of a possessor requires
pied-piping of the
containing DP. However, Davis (2021) shows that about half of speakers also
permit possessor extraction. In such examples, long-distance wh-movement or
topic/focus fronting separates the possessor from the Saxon genitive
morpheme [’s] as in (1). Davis uses a variety of diagnostics to argue that
this is truly possessor extraction:
(1) English possessor extraction (Davis 2021, ex. 2. See that work for many
analogous examples.)
Mary is the author [CP who1 they said [CP [DP t1’s new book] is good]].
Based on a new study of 17 speakers, I show that such extraction has an
un-noticed restriction. Though 14/17 speakers who accept examples like (1)
also accepted extraction of a full DP by topic/focus fronting, all rejected
extraction of possessive pronouns like "my". I argue that possessive
pronouns are immobile because they are portmanteau morphemes which express
a non-constituent unit—a possessive D and the possessor in its
specifier—via morphological spanning (Bye & Svenonius 2012, Merchant 2015,
Svenonius 2016, a.o.). Further, I argue that this finding entails that
phase spell-out applies to entire phases (Fox & Pesetsky 2005, Ko 2014,
a.o.). See attached PDF for full abstract.