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Probes And Their Horizons, Stefan Keine

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation develops a comprehensive theory of 'selective opacity', syntactic configurations in which one and the same syntactic domain is transparent to some operations, but opaque to others. The prime example of selective opacity are finite clauses in English, which are transparent to A'-movement, but opaque to A-movement. Following and extending the previous literature, I argue that selective opacity extends beyond the A/A'-distinction and even to syntactic dependencies that do not involve movement. Empirically, I argue that selective opacity exhibits intriguing meta-generalizations, which become evident once selective opacity across constructions and languages is treated as a uniform phenomenon. These two …