On the island sensitivity of topicalization in Norwegian: An experimental investigation

Abstract

Mainland Scandinavian languages have been reported to allow movement from embedded questions, relative clauses, and complex NPs-domains commonly considered to be islands crosslinguistically. Yet in formal acceptability studies Scandinavian participants often show 'island effects': they reject island-violating movement similarly to native speakers of 'island-sensitive' languages. To investigate this apparent mismatch between informal and formal judgments, we conducted two acceptability judgment experiments testing the acceptability of topicalization from various island domains in Norwegian. We were interested in determining whether we could (i) find evidence for island insensitivity and (ii) pin down the source of qualitatively different island effects. We asked whether such effects are best explained as reflecting violations of a uniform syntactic constraint or extrasyntactic factors. Our results suggest that embedded questions and relative clauses are not uniform syntactic islands for topicalization, but complex NPs are. Unexpectedly, we also found evidence suggesting that conditional adjunct clauses may not be islands.*

Island effects in Spanish comprehension

“…Sprouse and colleagues' paradigm was later replicated in English and extended to Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, Norwegian, Slovenian, Hebrew and Arabic (Sprouse et al 2011;Almeida 2014;Michel 2014;Aldosari 2015;López Sancio 2015;Sprouse et al 2016;Kush et al 2018;Ortega-Santos et al 2018;Stepanov et al 2018;Keshev & Meltzer-Asscher 2019;Kush et al 2019;Tucker et al 2019). Table 1 provides an overview of these studies, which tested either the same or a subset of the four island types examined by Sprouse and colleagues.…”

“…Table 1 provides an overview of these studies, which tested either the same or a subset of the four island types examined by Sprouse and colleagues. In most cases, object extraction was tested in wh-questions with bare fillers (Sprouse et al 2011;2012;Almeida 2014;Michel 2014;Sprouse et al 2016;Kush et al 2018;Stepanov et al 2018), but some studies used relative clause, left dislocation or topicalization configurations, complex fillers (e.g., which book), subject extraction, or resumptive pronouns (Almeida 2014;Aldosari 2015;Sprouse et al 2016;Kush et al 2018;Ortega-Santos et al 2018;Keshev & Meltzer-Asscher 2019;Kush et al 2019;Tucker et al 2019).…”

“…Further, Stepanov and colleagues (2018) and Keshev and Meltzer-Asscher (2019) tested temporal interrogatives (introduced by when) and Ortega-Santos and colleagues (2018) tested causal interrogatives (introduced by why). All studies collected acceptability judgments with untimed tasks, using either magnitude estimation (Sprouse et al 2011;2012;Stepanov et al 2018) or a 7-point scale (Sprouse et al 2012: experiment 1; Almeida 2014; Michel 2014; Aldosari 2015; López Sancio 2015; Sprouse et al 2016;Kush et al 2018;Ortega-Santos et al 2018;Keshev & Meltzer-Asscher 2019;Kush et al 2019;Tucker et al 2019).…”

“…Sprouse and colleagues created an experimental paradigm that attempts to isolate island effects from possible confounding factors such as the distance between the filler and the gap. This paradigm has been fruitfully used across languages such as English, Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, Norwegian, Slovenian, Hebrew and Arabic (Sprouse et al 2011;2012;Almeida 2014;Michel 2014;Aldosari 2015;López Sancio 2015;Sprouse et al 2016;Kush et al 2018;Ortega-Santos et al 2018;Stepanov et al 2018;Keshev & Meltzer-Asscher 2019;Kush et al 2019;Tucker et al 2019). The current study applies this paradigm to Spanish, a language in which there have been few empirical studies, even though previous syntactic literature has reported varying acceptability between different island types.…”

No escape from the island: On extraction from complement wh-clauses in English

“…(4) b. Danish: Diffi cult to process The option of cP-recursion may not be available in relation to all types of island constructions (adjunct islands, relative clauses, complex NPs, subject islands, whether-islands, etc. ), as there appears to be some variation in the acceptability of extractions from these domains within and across the Mainland Scandinavian languages (Kush, Lohndal & Sprouse 2018;Kush, Lohndal & Sprouse 2019;Tutunjian et al 2017). 2 Interestingly, however, 2 As explained in the introduction, the option in Danish of a recursive functional cP-layer ('little' cP) that provides an extra specifi er position as an escape hatch is available only in subordinate clause types.…”