Island sensitivity in Brazilian Portuguese quem nunca? Constructions

Abstract

This paper provides an account of why the remnant of the ellipsis site is not able to have a correlate within an island constituent in the antecedent, as attested in Brazilian Portuguese Quem nunca? (literally “Who never?”) constructions. By arguing that Quem nunca? involves clausal ellipsis, I show that ellipsis licensing  in this case is sensitive to islandhood. This is discussed in view of Griffiths and Lipták (2014) approach to island repair under ellipsis based on the notion of scopal parallelism, in which lack of parallelism implies island effects. Their idea is that variables in the ellipsis site and in the antecedent must be bound from parallel positions. I argue that a contextual notion of parallelism is required, in the sense that different projections from the same domain count as parallel. I adopt Bošković’s (2021) contextual approach to EPP, in which EPP is satisfied in the highest projection of a domain, and not invariably by T. I have also claimed that under certain conditions the EPP domain can be expanded for the purpose of parallelism.