Journal Article

Anatomy of a Counterexample: Extraction from Relative Clauses

Sichel, Ivy

2018

Overview

Relative clauses (RCs) are considered islands for extraction, yet acceptable cases of overt extraction from RCs have been attested over the years in a variety of languages: Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Japanese, Hebrew, English, Italian, Spanish, French, and also in Lebanese Arabic and Mandarin Chinese, where covert extraction from an RC is observed. The possibility for extraction has often been presented as evidence against a syntactic theory of locality, and in favor of constraints defined in terms of information structure, or processing limitations and constraints on working memory. Another possibility, still hardly explored, is that locality is determined syntactically, combined with a more fine-grained structure for RCs and a theory of how extraction from this structure interacts with the theory of locality. I argue in favor of the latter approach. I assume the structural ambiguity of RCs and argue that while externally headed RCs do block extraction, extraction is possible, under certain conditions, from a raising RC, and is formally similar to extraction from an embedded interrogative.

• Publisher: MIT Press,The MIT Press,MIT Press Journals, The
• Subject: Ambiguity / Arabic language / canonical and noncanonical existentials / Constraints / Covert / Danish language / embedded interrogatives / English language / Extraction / French language / Hebrew language / Information structure / Islands / Italian language / Japanese language / Languages / Locality / Mandarin / movement / Norwegian language / presuppositional DP / raising relatives / Relative clauses / Short term memory / Spanish language / Swedish language / Syntactic movement / Syntactic structures / Theory / weak islands