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Share Paper 1440

The Adjunction Prohibition and Extraction from Non-Factive CPs
Carlos de Cuba
123-131 (complete paper or proceedings contents)

Abstract

This paper discusses the syntax and semantics of sentential complements to factive and non-factive predicates. A unified account of both factive island constraints and the lack of presupposition in non-factive complements is presented. The author argues for an extra projection in the CP field (cP) selected by non-factive predicates. The cP projection is headed by a semantic operator that serves to remove the speaker of the sentence from responsibility for the truth content of the embedded clause. Following McCloskey (2005), the presence of the extra projection allows for adjunction to CP under wonder/ask predicates, which select a recursive CP structure, while the Adjunction Prohibition disallows adjunction to CP under factive predicates, which directly select CP. McCloskey's analysis is extended to cases of non-factive complementation, supported by data from Irish English varieties and Mainland Scandinavian. The proposed presence of cP under non-factives provides an escape hatch for adjunct movement that is unavailable under factives. Adjunct movement is argued to proceed through a different position than argument movement (adjunction vs. movement through Spec CP), leading to the observed asymmetries in movement possibilities. These asymmetries are due to differences in syntactic structure (presence or absence of cP).

Published in

Proceedings of the 25th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics
edited by Donald Baumer, David Montero, and Michael Scanlon
Table of contents
Printed edition: $375.00