To be an or not to be an island : the status of adjuncts

Abstract

In this thesis I focus on the possibility of extraction from prepositional adjuncts in Italian, from both a theoretical and an experimental point of view. I show that extraction from these domains is sometimes licensed, both in Italian and cross-linguistically, and that it is deeply influenced by many factors, such as the position of the adjunct and its syntactic integration with the main clause. I present three experiments I conducted on Italian native speakers, where the main issue is whether extraction from different types adverbial clauses is possible. The crucial result is that different adjuncts behave differently with respect to extraction phenomena. I therefore claim that they are not a uniform syntactic class. Therefore, I show that the traditional approaches to adjuncts are not suitable, in that they are too strong (see Huang 1982; Uriagereka 1999; Chomsky 2004; Stepanov 2007). I propose a different analysis of extraction, based on: (i) the point of merger of adjuncts in the structure, and (ii) the possibility of forming a macroevent (Truswell 2011). I claim that the former is a crucial criterion able to explain the different behaviours of adjuncts, and that it is also needed for the creation of a macroevent: ‘merging’ the (sub)event of the main verb and the one of the adjunct is possible only with lower adjuncts, but not with higher ones. I will discuss also inter-speaker variability found in the experiments I conducted, and show that the creation of a single macroevent is able to account for these data.