Switch-Reference by Movement

This paper deals with a reference tracking system in which a marker indicates whether two clauses have a coreferent subject or not: Switch reference. I argue that obligatory control and same subject contexts in Switch reference languages have some properties in common. I therefore adopt the movement theory of obligatory control (cf. Boeckx et al., 2010) and develop a similar analysis for same subject environments: There is only a single DP which is moved from the marking clause to the reference clause. The morphological marker is analysed as the realization of T in an embedded clause which is sensitive to whether this movement has applied or not, but it is no longer a marker that tracks referential identity. In this way, indices and binding principles that are needed to account for referential (non-)identity in the traditional analysis of the phenomenon can be dispensed with. Furthermore, it is shown that characteristic cross-linguistic properties and some non-canonical instances of Switch reference follow from the analysis.