LING 371 Lecture Notes - Lecture 33: Non-Finite Clause, Theta Role, Preposition And Postposition

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

Document Summary

You can have a syntactic structure with a subsection, which can be an island. An island is a term that helps us remember what it is. To say that something is an island is not an analysis; it is an observation. We operate on several constraints when we determine that something is an island: The first challenge you have to overcome here is to try to determine what is actually happening. If you need to state what is being violated, or which island we are dealing with, this is the first question we need to ask ourselves. You need to figure out the base positions of all the elements. Here, the declarative version of this sentence should be mary bought a book that was about ___. The next step would be to figure out which predicate what is theta-linked with. Buy typically needs two arguments: an external argument (mary) and an internal argument (a book).