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Le 13 novembre 2026 de 14:00 à 16:00false false
Title: Not going the distance: the what, where and why of bounded extraction
Abstract:
Extraction dependencies, present in constructions like wh-questions and relative clauses, are usually thought of as being unbounded: the gaps can be arbitrarily far from the filler elements they associate with. Syntacticians of GB/Minimalist tradition tend to contrast such extraction against dependencies like raising (to subject/object) as distinct kinds of extraction (A' and A), with A-dependencies being highly local. Those working within frameworks like HPSG and LFG to tend to treat raising/control dependencies in a lexical fashion, leaving them to conclude that unboundedness is a core feature of extraction. Exceptions to unboundness, in form of island constraints (e.g. the Complex NP Constraint), are usually considered in terms of environments that forbid all gaps inside them, regardless of particular species of extraction.
In this talk I will introduce you to varieties of extraction whose locality resembles neither classic wh-movement nor raising: it can target non-subjects but not over (finite/certain) clause boundaries. In Stefan Keine's terms this results in selective opacity: complement clauses which block some kinds of long extraction but not others. We will review some case studies from less familiar languages (particularly Swahili, Mandarin Chinese), before focusing on environments in more familiar languages, especially non-finite relative clauses, which I am starting to investigate in an SNSF-funded project (Postdoc Mobility P500-1 242159, PI: Tom Meadows, Extraction beyond the binary: the view from the edge of non-finite clauses). We will conclude by reviewing some hypotheses about the source of boundedness, prominent among them being the Williams Cycle - the intuition what bounded extractions have in common is that they land lower in the clausal spine than their unbounded cousins.