Scope theory revisited : lessons from pied-piping in wh-questions
Name
1142635477-MIT.pdf
Size
11.06 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
ea1537d1dbc4f58f7104248cf469b5b4
Author(s)
Demirok, Ömer
Advisor(s)
Sabine Iatridou, Norvin Richards, and Roger Schwarzschild.
Alternative Title
Lessons from pied-piping in wh-questions
Date Issued
2019
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
It is widely assumed that both the movement-based theory of scope and the scope-based theory of intensionality fall short in the face of empirical challenges like 'exceptional' scope out of extraction islands and the possibility of transparent/de re construals for DPs inside extraction islands. The standard response to these challenges consists in assuming that grammar makes available in-situ methods of scope-taking in addition to movement- (e.g. pointwise composition (Hamblin, 1973; Kratzer and Shimoyama, 2002; Cable, 2010), choice functions (Reinhart, 1997, 1998)) and adopting a richer representation of intensionality (e.g. in-situ binding of world/situation-denoting pronouns (Percus, 2000)). This thesis argues that a closer study of pied-piping in wh-questions reveals the true power of already-existing tools in grammar. Building on the important insight that more complex scope-takers can be recursively built (Dayal, 1994; Charlow, 2017), I advance the idea that grammar makes crucial use of pied-piping to generate meanings that would otherwise be unavailable. I argue that with pied-piping in its toolbox, grammar may not need in-situ methods of scope-taking and in-situ methods of assigning DPs a transparent/de re construal.
Description
Thesis: Ph. D. in Linguistics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, 2019
Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 187-195).
Subjects
Linguistics and Philosophy.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Linguistics and Philosophy
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