On another apparent violation of the subject-island constraint in French
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Guido Mensching
Abstract
This chapter addresses extractions of wh-marked complements of nouns out of French subject DPs into direct interrogatives – an apparent violation of the subject island constraint. We explain why some speakers of French can extract such constituents into interrogatives with complex inversion, whereas the grammaticality of other interrogative structures is clearly degraded. Our formal analysis is based on the Minimalist Program and assumes that material extracted from DPs has to pass through the DP phase-edge. In complex inversion, a structure in which the subject itself needs to move to the CP, the reordered subject DP (with the complement of N at the DP phase-edge) moves as a whole, thus giving a surface order that violates the subject island constraint only in appearance.
Abstract
This chapter addresses extractions of wh-marked complements of nouns out of French subject DPs into direct interrogatives – an apparent violation of the subject island constraint. We explain why some speakers of French can extract such constituents into interrogatives with complex inversion, whereas the grammaticality of other interrogative structures is clearly degraded. Our formal analysis is based on the Minimalist Program and assumes that material extracted from DPs has to pass through the DP phase-edge. In complex inversion, a structure in which the subject itself needs to move to the CP, the reordered subject DP (with the complement of N at the DP phase-edge) moves as a whole, thus giving a surface order that violates the subject island constraint only in appearance.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Introduction 1
- The acquisition of verbal passives by Portuguese-speaking children 9
- Plus in the French negative system 29
- An experimental approach to parallelism in ellipsis 49
- On focal and wh -projections, indirect wh -questions, and quantificational chains 73
- Is there a dative alternation in Romanian? 91
- The interpretation of null subjects in Romanian 111
- Verum focus and Romanian polar questions 135
- The downward grammaticalisation of irrealis subordinators in Romanian, Salentino and southern Calabrese 157
- Differential object marking 171
- The effects of language ecology on syntactic structure 193
- The syntactic distribution of raddoppiamento fonosinttatico in Cosentino 205
- The causative-inchoative alternation (as we know it) might fall short 239
- On wh -extraction in de + que constructions in Spanish 263
- On another apparent violation of the subject-island constraint in French 277
- Moving towards an event 297
- Cyclicity without containment in Romanian perfects 311
- Dative clitics in Romanian ditransitives 335
- Syntactic vs pragmatic passive 357
- Index 373
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Introduction 1
- The acquisition of verbal passives by Portuguese-speaking children 9
- Plus in the French negative system 29
- An experimental approach to parallelism in ellipsis 49
- On focal and wh -projections, indirect wh -questions, and quantificational chains 73
- Is there a dative alternation in Romanian? 91
- The interpretation of null subjects in Romanian 111
- Verum focus and Romanian polar questions 135
- The downward grammaticalisation of irrealis subordinators in Romanian, Salentino and southern Calabrese 157
- Differential object marking 171
- The effects of language ecology on syntactic structure 193
- The syntactic distribution of raddoppiamento fonosinttatico in Cosentino 205
- The causative-inchoative alternation (as we know it) might fall short 239
- On wh -extraction in de + que constructions in Spanish 263
- On another apparent violation of the subject-island constraint in French 277
- Moving towards an event 297
- Cyclicity without containment in Romanian perfects 311
- Dative clitics in Romanian ditransitives 335
- Syntactic vs pragmatic passive 357
- Index 373
