Factive islands from necessary blocking
Oshima (2007) and Schwarz & Simonenko (2018a) credit the unacceptabilityof so-called factive islands to necessary infelicity – the violation of someor other felicity condition on (wh-)questions in all accessible contexts. We applythis analysis to new types of factive islands – in wh-questions with if any and inmultiple wh-questions – and argue that they pose challenges for an analysis in termsof necessary infelicity. We propose that factive islandhood can be understood asdue to necessary blocking: in all accessible contexts where such a question wouldotherwise be felicitous, the speaker would have had to use a different, more suitable,question instead. We show that the necessary blocking analysis applies correctly toboth classic factive islands and to the new types that we have identified.