Finite adjunct clauses are often assumed to be among the strongest islands for filler–gap dependency creation cross-linguistically, but Kush, Lohndal & Sprouse (2019) found experimental evidence suggesting that finite conditional om-adjunct clauses are not islands for topicalization in Norwegian. To investigate the generality of these findings, we ran three acceptability judgment experiments testing topicalization out of three adjunct clause types: om ‘if’, når ‘when’ and fordi ‘because’ in Norwegian. Largely replicating Kush et al. (2019), we find evidence for the absence of strong island effects with topicalization from om-adjuncts in all three experiments. We find island effects for når- and fordi-adjuncts, but the size of the effects and the underlying judgment distributions that produce those effects differ greatly by island type. Our results suggest that the syntactic category ‘adjunct’ may not constitute a suitably fine-grained grouping to explain variation in island effects.
Recent experiments have confirmed earlier informal evidence that finite adjuncts are not islands categorically. Specifically, it has been shown that adjuncts are not necessarily islands for all dependency types (Sprouse et al. 2016), and that the island status of an adjunct depends on the type of the adjunct clause in question (Kush et al. 2019; Müller 2019; Bondevik et al. 2021; Nyvad et al. 2022). The current study further explores these questions by testing three different adjunct clause types: Clauses introduced by om ‘if’, fordi ‘because’ and når ‘when’, in a relative clause (rc) dependency in Norwegian. We find that forming an rc-dependency into a finite adjunct in Norwegian overall causes island effects, but that there are fine-grained differences within the category ‘adjunct’. Specifically, we find that fordi ‘because’ and når ‘when’ yield large island effects, while om ‘if’, on a par with Kobzeva et al. (2022) and Nyvad et al. (2022), yields intermediate results. Rather than relying on binary distinctions only, we argue that any theory that is to explain the empirical landscape must be sufficiently fine-grained and allow for gradient distinctions.
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