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Frequency effects in Subject Islands

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 July 2018

RUI P. CHAVES  and
JERUEN E. DERY
RUI P. CHAVES*
Affiliation:
Linguistics Department, SUNY Buffalo
JERUEN E. DERY*
Affiliation:
Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft
*
Author’s address: 609 Baldy Hall, Linguistics Department, SUNY, Buffalo, NY 14260-1030, USArchaves@buffalo.edu
Author’s address: Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Schützenstraße 18, 10117 Berlin, Germanydery@zas.gwz-berlin.de
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Abstract

This work provides evidence that Subject Island violation effects vanish if subject-embedded gaps are made as frequent and pragmatically felicitous as non-island counterpart controls. We argue that Subject Island effects are caused by the fact that subject-embedded gaps are pragmatically unusual – as the informational focus does not usually correspond to a dependant of the subject phrase – and therefore are highly contrary to comprehenders’ expectations about the distribution of filler–gap dependencies (Chaves 2013, Hofmeister, Casasanto & Sag 2013). This not only explains why sentences with subject-embedded gaps often become more acceptable ‘parasitically’, in the presence of a second gap outside the island, but also explains why some Subject Island violations fail to exhibit any amelioration with repetition (Sprouse 2009, Crawford 2011, Goodall 2011); some ameliorate marginally (Snyder 2000, 2017) or moderately (Hiramatsu 2000, Clausen 2011, Chaves & Dery 2014), and others become fully acceptable, as in our case. This conclusion extends to self-paced reading Subject Island studies (Stowe 1986, Kurtzman & Crawford 1991, Pickering, Barton & Shillcock 1994, Phillips 2006), which sometimes find evidence of gap filling and sometimes do not.

Keywords

experimental syntaxfiller–gap dependenciesparasitism
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 55 , Issue 3 , 01 August 2019 , pp. 475 - 521
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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Footnotes

We thank audiences at the Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle, Université Paris Diderot, the Department of Linguistics at the University of Rochester, and the 21st International Conference on Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar for feedback about some of the preliminary results reported in this work. We would also like to acknowledge useful discussions with Colin Phillips, Gail Mauner, Gregory Ward, Jean-Pierre Koenig, Maryellen MacDonald, Monica Do, Philip Hofmeister, Robert Levine, and Thomas Wasow. The usual exculpations apply. Finally, we thank three anonymous Journal of Linguistics referees for helping us to significantly improve this paper. Jeruen E. Dery was supported by German Federal Ministry of Education and Research Grant No. 01UG0711.

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