Some Notes on Extraction Theory

Lutz, Uli

doi:10.1075/la.11.02lut

Cited by 18 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Featherston (2005) famously leveraged this approach to demonstrate that German speakers report the same pattern of acceptability for Superiority violations as speakers of English. This finding was particularly surprising given that several (informal) German acceptability studies had previously reported Superiority violations as “acceptable,” whereas several (informal) English studies had reported Superiority violations as “unacceptable,” leading many researchers to conclude that German lacks whatever constraints give rise to Superiority effects in English (Grewendorf 1988; Müller 1991; Haider 1993; Lutz 1996; Fanselow 2001). By using quantitatively defined effects rather than simple categorical mappings between acceptable/unacceptable and grammatical/ungrammatical, Featherston was able to show that the Superiority effects were nonetheless present in German.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Investigating variation in island effects

Kush

Lohndal

Sprouse

2017

Nat Lang Linguist Theory

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

We present a series of large-scale formal acceptability judgment studies that explored Norwegian island phenomena in order to follow up on previous observations that speakers of Mainland Scandinavian languages like Norwegian accept violations of certain island constraints that are unacceptable in most languages cross-linguistically. We tested the acceptability of wh-extraction from five island types: whether-, complex NP, subject, adjunct, and relative clause (RC) islands. We found clear evidence of subject and adjunct island effects on wh-extraction. We failed to find evidence that Norwegians accept wh-extraction out of complex NPs and RCs. Our participants judged wh-extraction from complex NPs and RCs to be just as unacceptable as subject and adjunct island violations. The pattern of effects in Norwegian paralleled island effects that recent experimental work has documented in other languages like English and Italian (Sprouse et al. 2012; Sprouse et al. 2016). Norwegian judgments consistently differed from prior findings for one island type: -islands. Our results reveal that Norwegians exhibit significant inter-individual variation in their sensitivity to whether-island effects, with many participants exhibiting no sensitivity to whether-island violations whatsoever. We discuss the implications of our findings for universalist approaches to island constraints. We also suggest ways of reconciling our results with previous observations, and offer a systematic experimental framework in which future research can investigate factors that govern apparent island insensitivity.

show abstract

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Investigating variation in island effects

Kush

Lohndal

Sprouse

2017

Nat Lang Linguist Theory

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The contrast between SUVs and non-SUVs has been claimed to be absent in German (Lutz 1996). Both (12a) and (12b) Russian is also said not to exhibit a contrast between SUVs and non-SUVs: (15a) and (15b) are equally acceptable (Rudin 1988 Indeed, Federenko (2005) found no ordering preference in Russian: both orders are judged equally acceptable and there is no effect of filler or intervenor accessibility.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%