The syntactic position of Polish by and Main Clause Phenomena

I show that the position of the irrealis particle by in Polish conditionals correlates with constraints on Main Clause Phenomena (MCP). When by is in C⁰, MCPs are precluded; when it is in a lower position, MCPs are available. I suggest that the movement of by to C⁰ accompanies the A′-movement of a world operator in conditional clauses (Bhatt & Pancheva 2006). The operator movement acts as an intervener for MCPs (Haegeman 2007, 2010a, 2010b). I present evidence from MCPs such as contrastive to-topicalization, long extraction of adjuncts, speaker-oriented adverbs and the availability of correlativization. The different syntactic position of by is supported by evidence from the behavior of wh-pronoun-type vs. complementizer-type counterparts of if.