Semantics of DP Islands: The Case of Questions

This paper provides a semantic-pragmatic answer to the question of why some definite DPs are islands for wh-subextraction while others are not. While it was suggested as early as in Chomsky (1973) that the key to the problem are differences between determiners involved, there has been no analysis which would be based on independently attested properties of the determiners. This paper focuses on the contrast in wh-subextraction between DPs with two kinds of definite articles, the so-called weak and strong ones, in Austro-Bavarian German, recorded in Brugger and Prinzhorn (1996). The analysis I offer makes use of the recent works showing that weak and strong definite articles can have different semantics. In particular, to account for the use and distribution of German strong articles, Schwarz (2009) assumes a semantics which routinely results in directly referential readings of the DPs headed by such articles. I show that, assuming a classic Hamblin/Karttunen semantics for questions, cases of wh-subextraction out of directly referential DPs would result in a trivial question which presupposes the asserted content of its possible answers. More broadly, this work aligns with a series of semantic-pragmatic analyses of constraints on island formation (Szabolcsi and Zwarts 1993, Fox and Hackl 2006, Oshima 2007, Abrus\'{a}n 2008, Abrus\'{a}n and Spector 2011, B. Schwarz and Shimoyama 2011, Mayr 2013).