Weak Island Semantics

Abstract

This book presents a novel semantic account of weak, or selective, islands. Weak islands are configurations that block the displacement of certain elements in a sentence. Examples of island violations with acceptable counterexamples include, ‘#How much wine haven’t you drunk?’ (but ‘Which girl haven’t you introduced to Mary?’), ‘#How does John regret that he danced at the party?’ (but ‘Who does John regret that he invited to the party?’), or ‘#How much wine do you know whether you will produce?’ (but ‘Which glass of wine do you know whether you’ll poison?’). For forty years or more explanations of the unacceptability of these island constructions have been syntactic. But syntactic accounts fail to explain why many weak-island violations are made almost acceptable by modals and attitude verbs, as in ‘How much wine aren’t you allowed to drink?’; ‘How fast do you hope Lewis didn’t drive?’; or ‘How does Romeo regret he was allowed to go to the party?’ The book puts forward a semantic analysis to account for the unacceptability of violations of negative, presuppositional, quantificational, and wh-islands, and argues that there is no need to assume abstract syntactic rules in order to derive these facts. It explains why grammaticality violations can be obviated by certain modal expressions, and why and how far the grammaticality judgments of speakers depend on the context of the utterance. If correct, this work has a fundamental consequence for the field of linguistics in general: it removes some of the most important reasons for postulating abstract syntactic rules as part of UG.