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On nominal islands and LF extraction in Chinese

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Abstract

Evidence from Chinese Wh-questions strongly suggests that LF locality is a matter of referentiality and nominality, while locality in overt syntax involves the requirement of head government. This observation echoes thesplit ECP approach of WAHL (1987). Specifically, Chinese arguments and referential adjuncts (when, where, instrumentalhow and purposewhy) contrast with nonreferential adjuncts (mannerhow and reasonwhy) in allowing wide-scope construals out of islands in LF. Overt Wh-fronting, on the other hand, displays an argument/adjunct asymmetry. This paper proposes to deal with the LF asymmetry within the Generalized Binding framework, in association with the referential/nonreferential distinction among Wh-elements. With the ECP reduced to thegeneralized binding principles (GBPs), it further argues for a type of locality employing the notion ofcheckpoints instead ofbarriers, according to which the [N] feature is checked along with the [WH] feature through Comp-indexing. Consequently, nominal clauses are always islands for nonnominal/nonreferential adjuncts, because either selectional restrictions or the GBPs will be violated by long-distance extraction. This move is independently motivated by a parallel asymmetry in Chinese (non)bridge-verb constructions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Linguistics, MIT 20D-219, 02139, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Wei-Tien Dylan Tsai

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This paper stems from my graduate work at National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan, where I benefited greatly from discussions with Jim Huang, Kuang Mei, Ting-Chi Tang, and Feng-Fu Tsao. Special thanks to Lisa Cheng and Yafei Li for their unfailing encouragement and painstaking proofreading. In addition, Noam Chomsky, Ken Hale, Jim Higginbotham, Masa Koizumi, Howard Lasnik, Audrey Li, Jo-Wang Lin, Alec Marantz, Toshi Oka, David Pesetsky, Luigi Rizzi, Jane Tang, and Akira Watanabe offered valuable comments at various stages of revision. I am also indebted to Fritz Newmeyer and twoNLLT reviewers for helpful advice, which has led to several significant improvements of this paper.

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Tsai, WT.D. On nominal islands and LF extraction in Chinese. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 12, 121–175 (1994). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00992747

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