Clausal doubling produces phantom islands
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Carlos Muñoz Pérez
and
Matías Verdecchia
Abstract
Clausal doubling in Spanish seemingly displays “island effects”, i.e., the construction is unacceptable if the doubled clause is located within a syntactic island. In this paper, we argue that these restrictions are cases of phantom islands, that is, not the result of true syntactic island violations, but rather a byproduct of the information structure of the doubling pattern. We maintain that these effects arise from the dislocated clause being a contrastive topic. Concretely, we claim that in these cases, the sentence fails to address the immediate question under discussion presupposed by its contrastive topic. We show that this approach also accounts for the distribution of clausal doubling in embedding contexts.
Funding source: ANID/FONDECYT
Award Identifier / Grant number: 11240339
Acknowledgments
We are grateful to two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. We thank Harry van der Hulst for his generous support during the review process. Finally, we thank the organizers and audiences of GLOW 45 and Going Romance 2022, where parts of this paper were presented, for their insightful discussions. All errors are our own.
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Research funding: Muñoz Pérez acknowledges funding from the ANID/FONDECYT project 11240339.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- Comparing syntactic and discourse accounts of islands and parasitic gaps: experimental evidence from acceptability judgments
- Clausal doubling produces phantom islands
- On reduced wh-questions in Dagara
- Passivization strategies under ECM: evidence from Spanish dialects
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- Comparing syntactic and discourse accounts of islands and parasitic gaps: experimental evidence from acceptability judgments
- Clausal doubling produces phantom islands
- On reduced wh-questions in Dagara
- Passivization strategies under ECM: evidence from Spanish dialects
