Volume 42, Issue 2

This study evaluates a recent account of islands and parasitic gaps, which proposes that island violations are unacceptable in part because they contain a referring argument in the predicate that contributes discourse-processing complexity. In two acceptability judgment experiments in Dutch, participants rated three types of filler-gap constructions that were preceded by a context manipulating the discourse accessibility of a referring argument in the target construction. The constructions differed in the location of the gap, which was realized as the complement of the matrix verb (regular filler-gap dependencies), as the complement of the verb in an adjunct clause (adjunct island violations), or as both (parasitic gap constructions). Adjunct clauses were untensed in Experiment 1 and tensed in Experiment 2. In both experiments, island violations were rated as unacceptable, regardless of whether the referring argument was discourse-accessible or discourse-novel. Parasitic gap constructions, which do not contain a referring argument in the predicate, were rated as acceptable, but only when the parasitic gap was located in an untensed clause. Reviewing these results from syntactic and discourse-processing perspectives, we conclude that the difference between islands and parasitic gap constructions is not a matter of discourse-processing complexity. The data instead support a primarily syntactic account of parasitic gaps.

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.

This article provides novel data involving reduced wh -questions in Dagara. The language exhibits some important properties, among which are the availability of the movement and the in-situ option for wh -phrases in wh -questions and the obligatory presence of the focus marker accompanying remnant wh -phrases. We propose and argue for an analysis in terms of overt movement of wh -phrases and ellipsis of a clausal constituent à la what has been called sluicing. We also observe that reduced questions in Dagara exhibit island repair effects. As a theoretical consequence, we point out that they weaken one of the supporting arguments for the so-called in-situ analysis of sluiced clauses.

This paper discusses local and non-local instances of passivization in Spanish. Special attention is paid to passivization in ECM scenarios, since they are known to display more and more subtle parametric nuances (see Ciutescu 2018, Sheehan 2019, 2020a, and references therein). In order to account for the facts, an Activity Condition / Case Filter (Chomsky 2000 and ff.) analysis is put forward. Discussion covers cases of (dialectal) variation within Spanish, showing that the impossibility for NPs to undergo non-local A movement follows from their degree of inactivity, which in turn is sensitive to the type of Case NPs receive (structural or inherent, with particularities related to DOM and partitive Case in Romance). The size / category of the embedded clause and the number of arguments are shown to be relevant in the calculation of Case assignment too, in accord with the discussion on the different behavior of perception and causative predicates (see Ciutescu 2018, Casalicchio & Sheehan 2021, and references therein).