The Unity of Movement

This chapter investigates asymmetries in doubling among verbs, objects and subjects in Cantonese. It is shown that each of these elements has a distinct doubling profile in topic constructions and right dislocation: doubling is sometimes prohibited, required or optional. Couched in terms of the copy theory of movement, I suggest that that the operation responsible for erasing copies in a movement chain is regulated by phonological requirements that follow from a version of cyclic linearization.