Advanced theoretical syntax

SL6BY071

Islands

The aim of this class is to reflect on the nature, the boundaries and the explanations of island constraints. It will have both a theoretical and an empirical/experimental stance, including 1) a survey of the theoretical proposals that have been made and their problems ; 2) an exploration of radically alternative proposals advocating processing difficulties or pragmatic oddities as the only factors explaining islands ; 3) the setting of some experimental guidelines on how to tease apart these factors.

Students taking the seminar will have a) to discuss a paper b) to present about an experiment to be: to pick up an island, an analysis and a language, and set up an experiment aiming at testing the predictions of that analysis for that island effects on that language.

The main text : Cedric Boeckx . 2012. Syntactic Islands, CUP.

References

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• Cinque, G. 1978. Towards a unified treatment of island constraints. In Proceedings of the 12th International Congress of Linguistics, Insbrucker Beitragezur Sprachwissenschaft, W. Dressler and W. Meid (eds.), 344–348.
• Epstein, S. D., H. Kitahara, and T. D. Seely. 2010. Structure building that can’t be. Ms., University of Michigan, Keio University, and Michigan StateUniversity.
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