Abstract
There are many psycholinguistic questions concerning the so-called ‘Island Constraints’ which restrict the range of A′-movement across languages. In this paper, I will discuss the boundedness of A′-movement in American Sign Language (ASL), and raise some of the psycholinguistic questions regarding the learnability and acquisition of these constructions. ASL is the visual-gestural language used by deaf people in the United States and parts of Canada. A′-movement in ASL is found, but it is bounded even more than A′-movement in English, as will be shown. However, ASL also allows null and overt resumptive pronouns to save potential island violations, so that many structures which might appear to be such violations are actually grammatical. In the first section of this paper, the facts of the boundedness of A′-movement in ASL will be discussed.
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© 1992 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Lillo-Martin, D. (1992). Sentences as Islands: On the Boundedness of A′-Movement in American Sign Language. In: Goodluck, H., Rochemont, M. (eds) Island Constraints. Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, vol 15. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1980-3_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1980-3_9
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
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