Return to search

The Topography of Syntactic Islands

The Adjunct Island Constraint proposed by Ross (1967) together with Chomsky’s Barriers (1986) are not sufficient to account for the ungrammaticality of wh-extraction out of adjunct clauses, nor do they address the instances of grammatical extraction out of such constructions. Extraction out of Adjunct Islands is now completely predictable using a combination of Chomsky’s Minimalist Program (1995) and Kehler’s Coherence Theory (2002). The combination of these two theories gives an account of both the grammatical and ungrammatical instances of wh- extraction out of adjuncts.
The principles of the Minimalist Program together with evidence from Old English adverbial clauses determines the necessary structure for grammatical extraction, while an extension of the Coherence Theory mandates the required semantic relation between the matrix and adjunct clauses. This thesis proves that the possibility of wh-extraction out of adjunct islands is dependent upon the seamless integration of syntax and semantics.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:LSU/oai:etd.lsu.edu:etd-11082004-201124
Date10 November 2004
CreatorsAlfandre, Danielle Rachel
ContributorsMichael Hegarty, Hugh Buckingham, Janna Oetting
PublisherLSU
Source SetsLouisiana State University
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext
Formatapplication/pdf
Sourcehttp://etd.lsu.edu/docs/available/etd-11082004-201124/
Rightsunrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached herein a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to LSU or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below and in appropriate University policies, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report.

Page generated in 0.0018 seconds