著者

宮川 繁

出版者

神田外語大学

雑誌

Scientific approaches to language (ISSN:13473026)

巻号頁・発行日

no.2, pp.241-242, 2003-03-25

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Weak islands are called "weak" because they don't block extraction of arguments but they do block extraction of adjuncts. (1) a. What do you wonder [whether to fix t]? b. Why do you wonder [what to fix t]? Does this mean that argument extraction is not affected at all? It is well-known that a weak island bars an interpretation otherwise available with argument extraction, that of pair-list (Longobardi 1985, Cresti 1995). (2) What do you wonder [whether everyone will buy t]? This example only has a single-pair interpretation ("I'm wondering whether everyone will buy a new coat"), Using Relativized Minimality (Rizzi 1990) as a guiding principle, and extending Aoun and Li's (1989) general approach, I will argue that the effects we can observe with weak islands are part of a general property of quantification, (3) All quantification is local, If Quantifier X c-commands Quantifier Y, Y cannot take "inverse" scope over X. A weak island is a form of quantification, because it is headed by such an element as a wh operator. It thus prohibits any scope-bearing item, either an argument or an adjunct, from taking proper scope above it. I will show that the reason why argument extraction appears to be possible is due to a covert resumptive pronoun strategy (cf. Cinque 1990, Postal 1998, Stroik 1992). I will formally characterize the locality of quantification using Beck's (1996) Quantifier-Induced Barrier (QUIB), making a subtle but crucial revision in her definition to incorporate a much wider range of data. Weak islands, as we will see, are simply a subset of QUIBs. This also explains a mystery noted by Hoji (1986) that in Japanese, an example such as the following lacks a pair-list interpretation. (4) Nani-o daremo-ga t katta no? what-ACC everyone-NOM bought Q 'What did everyone buy?' Independently, we can see that the universal quantifier in Japanese is a QUIB (cf. Hoji 1985). The lack of pair-list in this example is exactly the same as the lack of this interpretation in the English weak-island example in (2). Time permitting. I will also explore the issues that naturally arise with inverse scope in English, as in the example, "Someone loves everyone.