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Books > Language & Literature > Language & linguistics > Grammar, syntax, linguistic structure
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Weak Island Semantics (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R4,007
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Weak Island Semantics (Hardcover)
Series: Oxford Studies in Semantics and Pragmatics, 3
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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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. Syntactic accounts have also provided some of
the key empirical motivation for Chomsky's claim that universal
grammar (UG) contains language independent abstract syntactic
constraints. But syntactic accounts, however subtle, 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?' Dr
Abrusan considers which contexts and expressions create - or are
sensitive to - weak island violations, and examines the factors
that go some way to curing them. She puts forward a semantic
analysis to account for the unacceptability of violations of
negative, presuppositional, quantificational and wh-islands. She
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. The book argues
that there is no need to assume abstract syntactic rules in order
to derive these facts; rather, they can be made to follow from
independent semantic principles. 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, and hence weakens the arguments for
postulating a module of UG.
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