Abstract
Experimental work on islands has used formal acceptability judgment studies to quantify the severity of different island violations. This current study uses this approach to probe the (in-)violability of definite islands, an understudied island, in offline and online measures. We conducted two acceptability judgment studies and find a modest island effect. However, rating distributions appear bimodal across definites and indefinites. We also conducted a self-paced reading experiment, but found no sig- nificant effects. Overall, offline, definite islands differ from other uniform islands, but online, the results are more complicated.
Highlights
This paper aims to investigate the offline and online processing status of an understudied class of island: definite islands
We will first consider offline judgments to determine how acceptable speakers find these constructions in isolation, and move to online processing to test whether speakers are sensitive to definite islands in real time
Experiment 1b differs from Experiment 1a in that there was a significant interaction between distance and definiteness
Summary
This paper aims to investigate the offline and online processing status of an understudied class of island: definite islands. We will first consider offline judgments to determine how acceptable speakers find these constructions in isolation, and move to online processing to test whether speakers are sensitive to definite islands in real time. One interesting feature of definite islands is their somewhat variable status (Chomsky 1973). Explanations for this gradience vary (Chomsky 1973, Keller 2000, Davies & Dubinsky 2003), but it is a shared intuition the example below is intermediate in terms of acceptability (Chomsky 1973)
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