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Experimental syntax and the variation of island effects in English and Italian

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An Erratum to this article was published on 02 June 2015

Abstract

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.

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Notes

  1. We are reporting here Rizzi’s judgments from the late 70s. Today, interrogative clauses like Chi ha comprato cosa? (‘Who bought what?’) are acceptable in many varieties of Italian, including journalistic jargon, possibly as a borrowing from English. If a syntactic transfer is taking place, it is still on-going. For example, Chi ha comprato cosa? sounds better than other combinations of wh-phrases (including those that are acceptable in English). At the present time, the distribution of different wh-in-situ phrases in Italian displays a complex pattern (see Moro 2011).

  2. In Fig. 1 the length effect is represented by the downward slope of the lines, and the structure effect is represented by the vertical separation between the two lines.

  3. Italian relative clauses are introduced by the same complementizer as embedded declarative clauses or by two different series of relative pronouns that are different from the wh-words that occur in wh-interrogative clauses.

  4. One logically possible explanation for the variation observed in subject and adjunct islands is that the materials were confounded in the items that showed the variation. For example, the lack of subject island effects with Italian rc-dependencies could be explained if those materials (and only those materials) contained post-verbal subjects instead of pre-verbal subjects. And the lack of adjunct island effects with English rc-dependencies could be explained if those materials (and only those materials) contained complement if-clauses instead of adjunct if-clauses. We believe that this sort of explanation (in which the results are the consequence of a confound) is extremely unlikely due to the careful nature of our materials construction, therefore in the discussion that follows we will take the results at face value. We have posted the entire set of materials on the first author’s website so that interested readers can assess the likelihood of these confounds for themselves.

  5. Thanks to Norbert Hornstein (p.c.) and one anonymous reviewer for bringing this point to our attention.

  6. Although we did test wh-islands, which have figured prominently in semantic approaches to island effects such as Szabolcsi and Zwarts (1993) and Abrusán (2011), we did not find any variation in their presence, so our results do not impact debates between syntactic and semantic approaches. We did not test relative clause islands (which have figured prominently in pragmatic approaches to island effects such as Erteschik-Shir 1973 and Goldberg 2006), so our results do not contribute to that discussion. Finally, the conditional adjunct islands that we tested are not the same type of adjunct island in the semantic approach of Truswell (2007).

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Acknowledgements

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.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Linguistics, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA

    Jon Sprouse

  2. Department of Linguistics, University of California, San Diego, CA, USA

    Ivano Caponigro

  3. Department of English Studies, University of Ghent, Ghent, Belgium

    Ciro Greco

  4. Department of Psychology, University of Milan-Bicocca, Milan, Italy

    Carlo Cecchetto

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  1. Jon Sprouse
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Correspondence to Jon Sprouse.

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Sprouse, J., Caponigro, I., Greco, C. et al. Experimental syntax and the variation of island effects in English and Italian. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 34, 307–344 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-015-9286-8

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