TY - JOUR
T1 - Experimental syntax and the variation of island effects in English and Italian
AU - Sprouse, Jon
AU - Caponigro, Ivano
AU - Greco, Ciro
AU - Cecchetto, Carlo
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported in part by National Science Foundation grants BCS-0843896 and BCS-1347115 to JS. CG was supported by the Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (FWO)—FWOproject-2009-Ofysseus-Heageman-G091409 during the final revision of the manuscript. We would like to thank Michela Marchesi for assistance collecting data for the Italian wh-dependencies experiment. We would like to thank Jeremy Hartman, Norbert Hornstein, Luigi Rizzi, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this article. We would also like to thank audiences at Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Illinois Chicago for helpful comments at various stages of the development of this study. All errors remain our own.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2015, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht.
PY - 2016/2/1
Y1 - 2016/2/1
N2 - The goal of this article is to explore the utility of experimental syntax techniques in the investigation of syntactic variation. To that end, we applied the factorial definition of island effects made available by experimental syntax (e.g., Sprouse et al. 2012) to four island types (wh/whether, complex NP, subject, and adjunct), two dependency types (wh-interrogative clause dependencies and relative clause dependencies) and two languages (English and Italian). The results of 8 primary experiments suggest that there is indeed variation across dependency types, suggesting that wh-interrogative clause dependencies and relative clause dependencies cannot be identical at every level of analysis; however, the pattern of variation observed in these experiments is not exactly the pattern of variation previously reported in the literature (e.g., Rizzi 1982). We review six major syntactic approaches to the analysis of island effects (Subjacency, CED, Barriers, Relativized Minimality, Structure-building, and Phases) and discuss the implications of these results for these analyses. We also present 4 supplemental experiments testing complex wh-phrases (also called D-linked or lexically restricted wh-phrases) for all four island types using the factorial design in order to tease apart the contribution of dependency type from featural specification. The results of the supplemental experiments confirm that dependency type is the major source of variation, not featural specification, while providing a concrete quantification of what exactly the effect of complex wh-phrases on island effects is.
AB - The goal of this article is to explore the utility of experimental syntax techniques in the investigation of syntactic variation. To that end, we applied the factorial definition of island effects made available by experimental syntax (e.g., Sprouse et al. 2012) to four island types (wh/whether, complex NP, subject, and adjunct), two dependency types (wh-interrogative clause dependencies and relative clause dependencies) and two languages (English and Italian). The results of 8 primary experiments suggest that there is indeed variation across dependency types, suggesting that wh-interrogative clause dependencies and relative clause dependencies cannot be identical at every level of analysis; however, the pattern of variation observed in these experiments is not exactly the pattern of variation previously reported in the literature (e.g., Rizzi 1982). We review six major syntactic approaches to the analysis of island effects (Subjacency, CED, Barriers, Relativized Minimality, Structure-building, and Phases) and discuss the implications of these results for these analyses. We also present 4 supplemental experiments testing complex wh-phrases (also called D-linked or lexically restricted wh-phrases) for all four island types using the factorial design in order to tease apart the contribution of dependency type from featural specification. The results of the supplemental experiments confirm that dependency type is the major source of variation, not featural specification, while providing a concrete quantification of what exactly the effect of complex wh-phrases on island effects is.
KW - Cross-linguistic variation
KW - D-linking
KW - Experimental syntax
KW - Island effects
KW - Relative clauses
KW - wh-Movement
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U2 - 10.1007/s11049-015-9286-8
DO - 10.1007/s11049-015-9286-8
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84952945275
SN - 0167-806X
VL - 34
SP - 307
EP - 344
JO - Natural Language and Linguistic Theory
JF - Natural Language and Linguistic Theory
IS - 1
ER -