A prosodic constraint on wh-extraction from preverbal infinitival subjects

This paper introduces a series of mitigating circumstances improving the acceptability of wh-extraction from preverbal infinitival subjects in Rioplatense Spanish. It is argued that the factor behind these amelioration effects is encoded in prosodic structure, much in line with the hypothesis that c...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Isogloss 2022-01, Vol.8 (4), p.1-19
Main Authors: Muñoz Pérez, Carlos, Verdecchia, Matías, Carranza, Fernando
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Acceptability
Biographies
Constraints
Hypotheses
Infinitives
island repair
Phonetic form
Phonology
prosodic structure
Prosody
Restrictions
Rioplatense Spanish
Spanish language
Syntactic movement
Wh phrases
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:This paper introduces a series of mitigating circumstances improving the acceptability of wh-extraction from preverbal infinitival subjects in Rioplatense Spanish. It is argued that the factor behind these amelioration effects is encoded in prosodic structure, much in line with the hypothesis that certain island restrictions apply at PF. The linguistic principle accounting for the phenomenon is proposed to be a faithfulness constraint at the syntax-prosody interface stating that an extraction domain XP cannot be mapped as a prosodic word ω at PF. An alternative syntactic account based on freezing is shown to be unable to capture the relevant contrasts.
ISSN:2385-4138
2385-4138
DOI:10.5565/rev/isogloss.170