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  1. One Reason to Move, a Million Reasons to Be an Island: Third-Factor Explanations from Computational Syntax

    Graf, Thomas

    Abstract Two linguistic findings are commonly taken for granted yet are anything but trivial:

    1. Phrases can be displaced from their base position.
    2. Some phrases block displacement.

    On a technical level, these properties are hashed out in terms of movement and islands. From a …

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  2. Adjuncts, Conjuncts, Ojuncts: Deriving Strong Island Constraints

    Graf, Thomas

    Abstract Adjuncts differ from arguments by a number of properties, in particular i) optionality and ii) their island status, which renders them opaque for extraction of subconstituents. Conjuncts, too, are optional and forbid extraction. Starting from this basic observation, I demonstrate that islandhood …

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  3. The Syntactic Algebra of Adjuncts

    Graf, Thomas

    Abstract I argue that the special behavior of adjuncts is a consequence of two properties that set them apart from arguments: optionality and independence.

    • Optionality Adjuncts can be omitted.
    • Independence Independently well-formed adjuncts can be combined.

    These properties yield several grammaticality inferences that …

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