Structure of conditional and (cor)relative clauses: New evidence from locality
Petr Biskup, Radek Simik
April 2019 

We discuss the little known fact that left-adjoined conditionals like [If you invite John], the party will be fun are transparent for A'-extraction in Czech, yielding structures like This is the man who_1 [if you invite t_1], the party will be fun. String-identical but syntactically integrated conditionals The party will be fun [if you invite John] are strong islands, so that *This is the man who_1 the party will be fun [if you invite t_1] is ungrammatical. The same pattern is replicated for other types of argument and adjunct clauses, including correlatives/free relatives and various adverbial clauses (temporal, locative), including purpose clauses. (The pattern is attested in other Slavic languages, but the paper only discusses Czech data.) We argue that the asymmetry follows if left-adjoined clauses are propositional operator restrictors, a la Kratzerian conditionals, and hence CPs, while their integrated variants are donkey-anaphoric nominals, a la free relatives, and hence DPs/NPs. Extraction from left-adjoined clauses is therefore akin to extraction from embedded wh-interrogatives, while the islandhood of integrated clauses is akin to the islandhood of complex (definite) NPs. We devise a syntactic analysis of the pattern, based on phase theory and anti-locality, whereby movement out of a CP directly dominated by an NP necessarily violates anti-locality.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/004573 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Proceedings of NELS 49, Vol. 1, pp. 135-144
keywords:	conditionals, correlatives, free relatives, wh-clause, a'-extraction, locality, cp, complex np, semantics, syntax
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