Abstract
The possibility of extraction across awh-island is usually assumed to be dependent on whether or not the constituent in question can undergo “long” (i.e., nonlocal) Ā-movement across the island. However, the question of how to make a principled distinction between those elements which can violate locality and those which cannot is still rather controversial. I will propose that there are no well-formed locality violations in these cases, and that the grammaticality patterns observed derive from a semantic filter on the escape hatch used to bypass the island. In other words, if a phrase is extracted across awh-island, it must adjoin to the island in order to get by. This adjunction site is restricted by the interpretive component: only traces which are interpreted as variables of typee can occur in this position, while higher-order variables are not allowed. This restriction is shown to capture the known facts aboutwh-island violations, as well as some less known phenomena, such as the absence of functional (and pair-list) readings acrosswh-islands.
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I am particularly indebted to Irene Heim for her thorough comments and technical suggestions during various stages of this work. I would also like to thank Jim Higginbotham, Alec Marantz, and Luigi Rizzi for many stimulating and helpful comments. Versions of this paper have been presented, between February and June 1993, at the XIX Convegno di Grammatica Generativa in Trento, and at the universities of Köln and Tübingen. I would like to thank those audiences, in particular Sigrid Beck, Daniel Büring, Gennaro Chierchia, and Arnim von Stechow. I am also grateful to Hotze Rullmann, who independently arrived at much the same conclusion as I did, for sharing his work with me. Thanks also to the two anonymous reviewers for thoughtful comments and criticism. This work was supported by an NSF Graduate Fellowship.
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Cresti, D. Extraction and reconstruction. Nat Lang Seman 3, 79–122 (1995). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01252885
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01252885