Rethinking Scope Islands

Abstract

Relative clauses and tensed clauses are standardly assumed to be scope islands. However, naturally occurring counterexamples are abundant and easy to find. Therefore, we should revisit analyses that reject Quantifier Raising on the assumption that QR is clause-bounded. The data show that scope islands are sensitive to the identity of both the scope-taker and the predicate embedding the island. I propose the Scope Island Subset Constraint: given two scope islands, the scope-takers trapped by one will be a subset of the scope-takers trapped by the other. A simple refinement of semantic types allows encoding and enforcing of scope islands.