76 research outputs found
Factive islands from necessary blocking
No full textOshima (2007) and Schwarz & Simonenko (2018a) credit the unacceptability
of so-called factive islands to necessary infelicity – the violation of some
or other felicity condition on (wh-)questions in all accessible contexts. We apply
this analysis to new types of factive islands – in wh-questions with if any and in
multiple wh-questions – and argue that they pose challenges for an analysis in terms
of necessary infelicity. We propose that factive islandhood can be understood as
due to necessary blocking: in all accessible contexts where such a question would
otherwise be felicitous, the speaker would have had to use a different, more suitable,
question instead. We show that the necessary blocking analysis applies correctly to
both classic factive islands and to the new types that we have identified
The Family Tree model
No full text<p>Code for the following publication: <br>Pellard, Thomas, Robin Ryder & Guillaume Jacques. 2025. The Family Tree model. In Adam Ledgeway, Edith Aldridge, Anne Breitbarth, Katalin É. Kiss, Joseph Salmons & Alexandra Simonenko (eds.), <em>The Wiley Blackwell companion to diachronic linguistics</em>. Wiley Blackwell.</p>
Spellout and Double Determination in Mainland Scandinavian
No full textThis study considers a contrast in Mainland Scandinavian with respect to co-occurrence of a suffixal and a free-standing determiner ( double determination\u27\u27) in parallel to a series of contrasts in how the suffixal determiner is realized phonologically. On the basis of the phonological evidence I propose that in Norwegian and Swedish the suffixal determiner does not belong to the same phonological domain with the root with respect to several phonological processes, in contrast to Danish. Consequently, I argue that only in the former two languages the suffixal determiner should be considered a spellout trigger and thus a phase-head. Independently of this, I propose that in all Mainland Scandinavian the head hosting the suffixal determiner has a feature [Affix], proposed by Roberts (2005), that triggers a head-movement, whereas the head hosting the free-standing determiner does not have this feature. This state of affairs offers itself as an ideal testing ground for the hypothesis that there are general grammar constraints on the distribution of movement driving features, in particular of an EPP-like feature [Affix]. I propose that [Affix] specification should be consistent within a phase, which represents an amendment to the EPP downward inheritance generalization of Biberauer et al. (2008). The absence of double determination\u27\u27 in Danish is then argued to follow from the non-phase head status of the head hosting the suffixal determiner in Danish, as this bleeds the environment for an [Affix] specification switch\u27\u27
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