Islands, successive-cyclic movement, and pied-piping

• Teacher: Norvin Richards (MIT)
• Theme: Islands
• Slot: 08.30-10.30 (parallel session 2)

Abstract

Island effects are a standard reference in traditional laments about loss of descriptive power in the shift from Government and Binding Theory to Minimalism; the demand for more principled explanation is said to have left us without the tools to describe a variety of constraints on how movement operates.  This course will examine what we know about why movement takes place, how much material can move, and where the movement should land.  We will consider a variety of recently proposed accounts of classic island effects, which both improve our understanding of the cross-linguistic facts and allow us to ground our explanations in more general considerations.

Reading list

Day 1
phillips and hofmeister papers

Day 2
Kotek, Hadas.  To appear.  Wh-fronting in a two-probe system.  Natural Language and Linguistic Theory.

Pesetsky, David.  2000.  Phrasal movement and its kin.  MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.

Day 3
Cable, Seth. 2010 Against the Existence of Pied-Piping: Evidence from Tlingit. Linguistic Inquiry, 41: 563-594.     

Kotek, Hadas, and Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine.  2013.  Covert pied piping in English multiple-wh questions.  ms., MIT. [http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/001736]

Day 4
Rackowski, A. & N. Richards. 2005. Phase Edge and Extraction: A Tagalog Case Study. Linguistic Inquiry  36: 565-599.    

Van Urk, Coppe, and Norvin Richards.  To appear.  Two components of long-distance extraction: successive-cyclicity in Dinka.  Linguistic Inquiry.    

Day 5
Erlewine, Michael Yoshitaka. 2013.  Anti-locality and optimality in Kaqchikel Agent Focus.  ms., MIT. [http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/001841]