LING 371 Lecture Notes - Lecture 28: Tibet, Video Gaming Clan, China National Petroleum Corporation

• School: McGill University
• Department: Linguistics
• Course: LING 371
• Professor: Junko Shimoyama

Document Summary

Question 1: when there is no wh-word, why have movement: the student (that) we saw was running to class. It would have been fine if the sentence were the student who we saw was running to class. There is a (cid:494)hole(cid:495) in the sentence see has to assign an internal theta-role: [dp the student (that) we saw [ ]] was running to class. Question 2: why not just assign that theta-role to the student: [[dp the student] that we saw [dp t]] was running to class. This would suggest that the student that we saw is a cp! Run would have to assign a theta-role to this cp. This cp would get case from the +finite t. The student (that) we saw would have a completely different structure from the student who we saw which clearly has wh-movement. Constraints (a. k. a. islands: complex dp constraint (island, wh-island, the subject condition, coordinate structure condition, that-t filter.