Former LRC Visitor Filippa Lindahl (University of Gothenburg) will present this Friday (March 11) in S-Circle on “Swedish relative clauses: Very weak islands”:
The mainland Scandinavian languages allow movement out of relative clauses, a phenomenon known as Relative Clause Extraction (RCE). In this talk, I present results from my ongoing dissertation project. Based on a collection of examples from conversation and radio, I give an overview of the environments in which RCE occurs, and which types of phrases are typically allowed to move out of RCs in Swedish. Most extraction in spontaneous usage consists of topicalization or relativization, but interrogative wh-movement and it-clefting out of RCs are also possible. Adjuncts are usually not extracted, but this is only a tendency; it is possible to extract adjuncts that are contrastive or deictic (denoting a specific point in time, for instance). On the other hand, it is impossible to form why-questions that question an RC-internal reason.
This suggests that Swedish RCs are a type of weak island (cf. Cresti 1995, Szabolcsi 2006, Ruys 2015). But Swedish RCs are even more transparent than well-known weak islands, in that they do not block functional readings of questions. Since Swedish RCs are opaque for certain types of phrases, namely why and certain other adjuncts, we cannot simply say that they are non-islands; but semantic approaches like Cresti 1995 and Ruys 2015 are too restrictive for Swedish, since these are specifically designed to explain why functional readings are blocked. Swedish relative clauses thus show that islands aren’t just strong or weak, but that they can be very weak.
As usual, S-Circle will meet at 2 pm in the Linguistics Common Room.