Right-Node Raising and Delayed Spellout

old_uid1014
titleRight-Node Raising and Delayed Spellout
start_date2006/04/03
schedule11h-12h30
onlineno
location_infobât. D, salle 143
summaryConsider the following contrast : (1) a. Which animali did John say that Mary knew a man who wrote _, and a woman who published _ an encyclopedia article about ti? b. * Which animali does John know a reporter who made famous a man who published _, and a woman who illustrated _ an encyclopedia article about ti? Both sentences involve wh-extraction of which animal as well as Right-Node Raising (RNR). In both sentences the wh-phrase has to escape from conjuncts that contain relative clause islands. But (1a) is good while (1b) is judged ungrammatical, presumably because of the additional relative clause island outside the conjuncts. The ability of RNR to feed wh-movement across conjunct-internal islands (1a) poses a problem for both transofmational analyses of RNR (Sabbagh 2003) and in situ analyses (Wilder 1999). The reappearance of island effects above conjunction (1b) is even more difficult to account for and further constrains the form of an adequate theory of RNR. We present an analysis in which RNR is the result of a general spell-out procedure interacting with multiple-dominance. The fact that islands inside the conjuncts do not block extraction in (1a) is explained by the assumption that the shared material is not spelled out until it is fully dominated, that is, until the level of conjunction. From that moment, islands have the same blocking effect as always, explaining the ungrammaticality of (1b). We start by reviewing several puzzling properties of RNR that have been discussed in the literature, as well as some of the proposed solutions. We proceed to present observations similar to those in (1), which have not been discussed before. We show that these new observations pose a problem for all current accounts of RNR. We then present our proposal and explain our background assumptions regarding spell-out, linearization, and multiple dominance.
responsiblesNash