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Exceptions to island constraints and syntactic theory
Abstract
In this dissertation I investigate exceptions to island conditions that have been noted in the literature and propose a generalized binding theory account of the licensing of wh-ts that takes wh-ts to be anaphoric and therefore subject to some of the same conditions as lexical anaphors. In Chapter 2 I make essential use of the mechanism of Tns-binding and subsume Tns-binding and AGR-binding under INFL-binding as a central property that regulates the relation between a wh-phrase and its wh-t. In this way I account for contrasts in the acceptability of long wh-movement in several languages as well as certain contrasts in the acceptability of QR contructions in French. In Chapter 3 I show that long wh-phrase wh-t dependencies are, in addition to INFL-binding, regulated by the presence of intervening referential NPs. I show that quantificational intervening NPs are much weaker blockers of long distance dependencies than referential NPs and allow violations of even strong islands such as complex NPs. These phenomena show that another principle is required to account for the full range of island constraints and exceptions to island contraints. In Chapter 4 I extend the theory presented in Chapter 2 to account for contrasts in the acceptability of clitic climbing in Spanish in terms of INFL-binding.
Subject Area
Linguistics
Recommended Citation
Boyd, John Raymond, "Exceptions to island constraints and syntactic theory" (1992). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI9219410.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI9219410