Scope theory revisited : lessons from pied-piping in wh-questions

It is widely assumed that both the movement-based theory of scope and the scope-based theory of intensionality fall short in the face of empirical challenges like 'exceptional' scope out of extraction islands and the possibility of transparent/de re construals for DPs inside extraction islands. The standard response to these challenges consists in assuming that grammar makes available in-situ methods of scope-taking in addition to movement- (e.g. pointwise composition (Hamblin, 1973; Kratzer and Shimoyama, 2002; Cable, 2010), choice functions (Reinhart, 1997, 1998)) and adopting a richer representation of intensionality (e.g. in-situ binding of world/situation-denoting pronouns (Percus, 2000)). This thesis argues that a closer study of pied-piping in wh-questions reveals the true power of already-existing tools in grammar. Building on the important insight that more complex scope-takers can be recursively built (Dayal, 1994; Charlow, 2017), I advance the idea that grammar makes crucial use of pied-piping to generate meanings that would otherwise be unavailable. I argue that with pied-piping in its toolbox, grammar may not need in-situ methods of scope-taking and in-situ methods of assigning DPs a transparent/de re construal.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctoral

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Linguistics and Philosophy

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2019

Author dc:creator

• Demirok, Ömer

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Sabine Iatridou, Norvin Richards, and Roger Schwarzschild.

• Linguistics and Philosophy.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/124104

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/124104