PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

Defining extraction domains has been a central issue for questions of locality in syntax for decades. The topic thus exhibits a long-lasting research tradition in various paradigms and models. Syntactic approaches, however, get challenged when restrictions on well-formed extraction constructions are encountered which do not allow an explanation based on structural differences straightforwardly. A case in point are that-complement clauses for which it is known that their transparency for extraction gets influenced by the verb which embeds them: So called bridge verbs allow extraction from their complement, non-bridge verbs do not. Because of the fact that an analysis of good and bad extraction verbs shows that the property which makes out a verb's "bridgedness" can best be accounted for in semantic terms, a non-structural account seems to be called for Even more evidence for non-structural influence comes from the observation that different subtypes of erothetic illocutionary force have an impact on the acceptability of the extraction construction. Based on these observations and the intention to account for them, this paper presents an analysis of opaque and transparent that-complements from a discourse semantic point of view focusing on the context update induced by the extraction constructions at issue.