Another way to avoid islands

Abstract

The notion of island repair in ellipsis constructions has received much attention. Existing analyses typically suggest that in island repair contexts, an element undergoes movement, inducing an island violation, and then the violation is removed by deleting the portion of the structure that contains the island. It has been observed that island violations do not arise in the Fragment Answer construction in Korean, whose derivation has also been argued to involve movement and deletion. In other words, the construction also manifests the island repair phenomenon. In this paper, I explore an alternative analysis of the absence of island effects in Fragment Answers in Korean without appealing to the notion of island repair. Assuming the movement and deletion analysis, I argue that the absence of island effects in the construction in question is a consequence of the interaction between two independently motivated processes, i.e., Pied-Piping in the sense of Cable (Linguist Inq 41:563–594, 2010a, The grammar of Q: Q-particles, wh-movement, and pied-piping, Oxford University Press, New York, 2010b) and Extra Deletion in the sense of An (J East Asian Linguist 25:313–350, 2016a). The gist of the proposal is that in the relevant contexts, instead of allowing illegitimate extraction from an island, the whole island itself undergoes movement and is subsequently reduced by deletion, leaving the focused phrase on the surface, which induces the façade of island repair. I also show that the current analysis straightforwardly accounts for a parallelism among constructions that are quite different in nature, i.e., Fragment Answers, gapless Right Dislocation, and Right Node Raising, which cannot be captured by existing approaches to the respective constructions. Thus, the parallelism provides strong evidence in support of the alternative analysis of island repair proposed in this paper.