Article
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WH-In Situ in Islands. A Semantic Analysis Based on Corpus Data.
Version 1
: Received: 11 June 2024 / Approved: 12 June 2024 / Online: 12 June 2024 (11:16:11 CEST)
How to cite: Kellert, O. WH-In Situ in Islands. A Semantic Analysis Based on Corpus Data.. Preprints 2024, 2024060815. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202406.0815.v1 Kellert, O. WH-In Situ in Islands. A Semantic Analysis Based on Corpus Data.. Preprints 2024, 2024060815. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202406.0815.v1
Abstract
This paper deals with wh-in situ elements (i.e. wh-elements that stay in the argument position) in islands such as adverbial clauses, conditionals, relative clauses, complement clauses, etc. extracted from corpora of Italian and Spanish. I will show that there are two types of wh-in situ embedded inside an island in these languages. One type is a real genuine question. Another type is an echo question. There are several approaches that convincingly account for the insensitivity of echo questions to islands. The genuine question type is still a puzzle for semantic and syntactic approaches. It turns out that wh-in situ questions with a genuine question interpretation are only possible inside islands that are not marked for sentence type and do not contain any operator that could block the question interpretation of the wh-in situ. This way question alternatives can be passed higher up the clause until they meet a question operator in the matrix clause that interprets them. Consequently, the question is well-formed and interpreted without any problem. Real islands contain semantic operators or quantifiers that interpret question alternatives triggered by wh-in situ until they reach the question morpheme to be interpreted as question alternatives. The result is that the derivation crashes.
Keywords
wh-in situ; islands; questions; formal semantics
Subject
Social Sciences, Language and Linguistics
Copyright: This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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