Deconstructing the Subject Condition in terms of cumulative constraint violation
-
Liliane Haegeman
and
Andrew Radford
Abstract
Chomsky (1973) attributes the island status of nominal subjects to the Subject Condition, a constraint specific to subjects. English and Spanish are interesting languages for the comparative study of extraction from subjects, because subjects in English are predominantly preverbal, whereas in Spanish they can be either preverbal or postverbal. In this paper we argue that the islandhood of subject DPs in both English and Spanish is not categorical. The degradation associated with extraction from subjects must be attributed to the interplay of a range of more general constraints which are not specific to subjects. We argue that the interaction of these constraints has a cumulative effect whereby the more constraints that are violated, the higher the degree of degradation that results. We also argue that some speakers have a greater tolerance for constraint violations than others, which would account for widespread inter-speaker judgment variability.
©2014 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Partitive and pseudopartitive structures Partitive and pseudopartitive structures in temporal adverbials
- Deriving Feature Inheritance from the Copy Theory of Movement
- Deconstructing the Subject Condition in terms of cumulative constraint violation
- Language as a discrete combinatorial system, rather than a recursive-embedding one
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Partitive and pseudopartitive structures Partitive and pseudopartitive structures in temporal adverbials
- Deriving Feature Inheritance from the Copy Theory of Movement
- Deconstructing the Subject Condition in terms of cumulative constraint violation
- Language as a discrete combinatorial system, rather than a recursive-embedding one
