Factive Islands and Interrogative Logical Triviality

Abstract

Factive predicates can prevent wh-movement from the clauses they embed (Cinque 1990). This 'factive island' effect has recently been analysed as resulting from pragmatic constraints on questions: wh-extraction is thought to be prohibited either because the resulting interrogative is systematically infelicitous(Schwarz & Simonenko 2018b), or because it is systematically blocked by competing interrogative forms (Schwarz, Oshima & Simonenko 2019). This paper notes empirical problems for both of these accounts, and offers an alternative explanation of factive islands in terms of 'IL-triviality', a novel extension of the notion of L-triviality (Gajewski 2002) to interrogative sentences.