Relative clauses are islands in Japanese: The case of double relatives

1. UNDERSTANDING THE TERMS OF THE DEBATE. In their response to our article (Sprouse et al. 2012), Hofmeister, Staum Casasanto, and Sag (2012, henceforth HSS) level three primary criticisms at our studies: (i) that working-memory (WM) correlations are not predicted by reductionist theories, (ii) that theWM tasks that we chose are inappropriate for showing the predicted correlation, and (iii) that our results do, in fact, show the predicted correlation. We note that these three criticisms appear to be contradictory—if any one were true, the other two would very likely be false—but here we focus on an attempt to clarify why all of them are unjustified: (i) theWM correlation is exactly what a viable account of the island effects predicts; (ii) the diversity of noncorrelations that have now been documented forces the reductionist account to abandon independently motivated memory mechanisms in favor of currently undefined ‘mystery’mechanisms; (iii) HSS’s characterization of our results is selective and misleading, and it inaccurately describes the predictions of the reductionist account of island effects. But before addressing these specific arguments it is worthwhile to briefly remind the reader of the central question of this debate. This is already discussed at length in our original article, but a number of the issues raised by HSS appear to be orthogonal to the central question. ISLAND EFFECTS are the sharp declines in acceptability that are found when WHdependencies and similar linguistic dependencies span certain structural domains, such as relative clauses, interrogative clauses, complex subjects, adjoined phrases, and many others. These structural domains are commonly known as syntactic islands. The empirical fact to be explained is uncontroversial: extraction from island structures is much less acceptable than would be predicted by the simple summation of the acceptability cost of (i) WH-extraction and (ii) the presence of island structures. We refer to this as the SUPERADDITIVE property of island effects, and the focus of the debate is on the source of this property. A long-standing view is that the superadditivity reflects a linguistic constraint that specifically targets the combination of extraction and islands (i.e. island violations). A huge literature has arisen from this starting point. An equally long-standing competing view is that island effects reflect limits on language processing resources. According to this REDUCTIONIST view, island effects can be explained without appeal to domain-specific linguistic constraints. The superadditive property of island effects cannot, of course, be explained by simply summing the processing cost of extraction and island structures, so the simplest reductionist view is a nonstarter. But a variant of this reductionist hypothesis is more promising. Perhaps the superadditivity is a consequence of resource overload: to the extent that simultaneously processing extraction and an island structure exceeds the available memory resources, the extra acceptability cost (i.e. the superadditivity) might be explained as the cost for exceeding the available memory resources (Kluender & Kutas 1993). This account makes a straightforward prediction: the degree of superadditivity should vary as a function of the WM resources available to an individual. We tested this prediction in two experiments with over three hundred speakers, and the results were not encouraging for the reductionist approach: individual differences in WM capacity accounted for an average of only around 1% of the variance

This paper examines the derivation of two types of A′-dependencies — relative clauses and Left-Dislocation structures — in the framework of Minimalist Program based on Mandarin data. Relatives and LD structures demonstrate many distinct syntactic and semantic properties when they contain a gap and a resumptive pronoun respectively. A thorough study of the relevant data reveals that when a gap strategy is adopted, island effects and crossover effects are always observed, irrespective of whether the relevant gap is embedded within a relative clause or within an LD structure; on the contrary, when the resumptive strategy is adopted, a sharp distinction is observed between these two structures. A resumptive relative clause gives rise to island effects and crossover effects systematically; by contrast, a resumptive LD structure never gives rise to these effects. In the Minimalist Program, island effects and crossover effects are not exclusively used as diagnostic tests for movement since the operationAgreeis also subject to locality constraints. I will argue that a relative clause containing either a gap or an RP and an LD structure with gap are derived byAgreeand they are subject to the locality condition whereas a resumptive LD structure is derived byMatchthat is an island free operation and it is not subject to the locality constraint. MultipleTransferand multiple Spell-Out are possible in anAgreechain, but not in aMatchingchain. The choice of the derivational mechanism depends on the interpretability of the formal features attached to the Probe and to the Goal in the relevant A′-dependencies.

In the first two decades following Ross’s Constraints on Variables in Syntax, a picture emerged in which the Mainland Scandinavian (MS) languages appeared to systematically evade some of the locality constraints proposed by Ross, including the relative clause (RC) part of the complex NP constraint. The MS extraction patterns remain a topic of debate, but there is no consensus as to why extraction from RCs should be so degraded in English (compared to MS)—or why it should be so acceptable in MS (compared to English). We present experiment results which indicate that English should be counted among the languages that allow extraction from RCs in at least some environments. Our results suggest a negligible island effect for RCs in predicate nominal environments and a substantially reduced island effect for those in canonical existential environments. In addition, we show that the size of the island effect resulting from extraction from an RC under a transitive verb is substantially reduced when the transitive verb is used to make an indirect existential claim. We present arguments that patterns of RC sub-extraction discovered in Mainland Scandinavian languages are mirrored in English, and we highlight methodological innovations that we believe may be useful for further investigation into this and other topics.

We present a series of large-scale formal acceptability judgment studies that explored Norwegian island phenomena in order to follow up on previous observations that speakers of Mainland Scandinavian languages like Norwegian accept violations of certain island constraints that are unacceptable in most languages cross-linguistically. We tested the acceptability of wh-extraction from five island types: whether-, complex NP, subject, adjunct, and relative clause (RC) islands. We found clear evidence of subject and adjunct island effects on wh-extraction. We failed to find evidence that Norwegians accept wh-extraction out of complex NPs and RCs. Our participants judged wh-extraction from complex NPs and RCs to be just as unacceptable as subject and adjunct island violations. The pattern of effects in Norwegian paralleled island effects that recent experimental work has documented in other languages like English and Italian (Sprouse et al. 2012; Sprouse et al. 2016). Norwegian judgments consistently differed from prior findings for one island type: whether-islands. Our results reveal that Norwegians exhibit significant inter-individual variation in their sensitivity to whether-island effects, with many participants exhibiting no sensitivity to whether-island violations whatsoever. We discuss the implications of our findings for universalist approaches to island constraints. We also suggest ways of reconciling our results with previous observations, and offer a systematic experimental framework in which future research can investigate factors that govern apparent island insensitivity.

Relative clauses are considered strong islands for extraction across languages. Swedish comprises a well-known exception, allegedly allowing extraction from relative clauses (RCE), raising the possibility that island constraints may be subject to “deep variation” between languages. One alternative is that such exceptions are only illusory and represent “surface variation” attributable to independently motivated syntactic properties. Yet, to date, no surface account has proven tenable for Swedish RCEs. The present study uses eyetracking while reading to test whether the apparent acceptability of Swedish RCEs has any processing correlates at the point of filler integration compared to uncontroversial strong island violations. Experiment 1 tests RCE against licit that-clause extraction (TCE), illicit extraction from a non-restrictive relative clause (NRCE), and an intransitive control. For this, RCE was found to pattern similarly to TCE at the point of integration in early measures, but between TCE and NRCE in total durations. Experiment 2 uses RCE and extraction from a subject NP island (SRCE) to test the hypothesis that only non-islands will show effects of implausible filler-verb dependencies. RCE showed sensitivity to the plausibility manipulation across measures at the first potential point of filler integration, whereas such effects were limited to late measures for SRCE. In addition, structural facilitation was seen across measures for RCE relative to SRCE. We propose that our results are compatible with RCEs being licit weak island extractions in Swedish, and that the overall picture speaks in favor of a surface rather than a deep variation approach to the lack of island effects in Swedish RCEs.

Mainland Scandinavian languages have been reported to allow movement from embedded questions, relative clauses, and complex NPs—domains commonly considered to be islands crosslinguistically. Yet in formal acceptability studies Scandinavian participants often show ‘island effects’: they reject island-violating movement similarly to native speakers of ‘island-sensitive’ languages. To investigate this apparent mismatch between informal and formal judgments, we conducted two acceptability judgment experiments testing the acceptability of topicalization from various island domains in Norwegian. We were interested in determining whether we could (i) find evidence for island insensitivity and (ii) pin down the source of qualitatively different island effects. We asked whether such effects are best explained as reflecting violations of a uniform syntactic constraint or extrasyntactic factors. Our results suggest that embedded questions and relative clauses are not uniform syntactic islands for topicalization, but complex NPs are. Unexpectedly, we also found evidence suggesting that conditional adjunct clauses may not be islands.

Recent research suggests that island effects may vary as a function of dependency type, potentially challenging accounts that treat island effects as reflecting uniform constraints on all filler-gap dependency formation. Some authors argue that cross-dependency variation is more readily accounted for by discourse-functional constraints that take into account the discourse status of both the filler and the constituent containing the gap. We ran a judgment study that tested the acceptability of wh-extraction and relativization from nominal subjects, embedded questions (EQs), conditional adjuncts, and existential relative clauses (RCs) in Norwegian. The study had two goals: (i) to systematically investigate cross-dependency variation from various constituent types and (ii) to evaluate the results against the predictions of the Focus Background Conflict constraint (FBCC). Overall we find some evidence for cross-dependency differences across extraction environments. Most notably wh-extraction from EQs and conditional adjuncts yields small but statistically significant island effects, but relativization does not. The differential island effects are potentially consistent with the predictions of the FBCC, but we discuss challenges the FBCC faces in explaining finer-grained judgment patterns.

Research on islands has been central to linguistic theory for more than 50 years. Its importance relies on the theoretical consequences islands posit for movement and long distance dependencies. In this paper we aim to explore the contrast between a variety of islands in Spanish relative clauses to reveal whether there is any gradience in the strength of the island effects. In order to tease apart fine-grained contrasts we run an acceptability judgment study based on the factorial definition of island, an experimental paradigm that aims to isolate the various factors that can affect the acceptability of a sentence involving island violations. Overall, we found that the five constructions tested (embedded wh-questions,whether-clauses, adjuncts, complex NPs and relative clauses) show island effects in Spanish and that there are limited differences in the size of these effects, which points to a more categorical view of islands.

Research on islands has been central to linguistic theory for more than 50 years. Its importance relies on the theoretical consequences islands posit for movement and long distance dependencies. In this paper we aim to explore the contrast between a variety of islands in Spanish relative clauses to reveal whether there is any gradience in the strength of the island effects. In order to tease apart fine-grained contrasts we run an acceptability judgment study based on the factorial definition of island, an experimental paradigm that aims to isolate the various factors that can affect the acceptability of a sentence involving island violations. Overall, we found that the five constructions tested (embedded wh-questions,whether-clauses, adjuncts, complex NPs and relative clauses) show island effects in Spanish and that there are limited differences in the size of these effects, which points to a more categorical view of islands.

Extraction from relative clauses is generally taken to be unacceptable in Icelandic, unlike in the Mainland Scandinavian languages. Recent studies on Mainland Scandinavian show that the type of dependency as well as the embedding predicate matters for the acceptability of such extractions, and the study of spontaneously produced examples has improved our ability to create felicitous extraction contexts. The studies of Icelandic extraction predate these findings, and there is to date no study which systematically compares parallel sentences in Icelandic and Mainland Scandinavian. This article presents such a study, using two acceptability judgment experiments, one in Icelandic and one in Swedish, drawing on newly gained insights about fronting conditions in the two languages to create plausible contexts. The Icelandic participants rated extraction from relative clauses as unnatural, with a very large acceptability cost compared to in situ versions and good fillers. Extraction from að-clauses received mixed ratings, and local fronting was rated on a par with the in situ versions. In Swedish, extraction from relative clauses was rated as natural a majority of the time. There was no extraction cost in local fronting, extraction from att-clauses, or extraction from relative clauses in existential sentences, while extraction with other embedding predicates incurred some cost. No differences relating to the embedding predicate were seen in Icelandic. The study corroborates the view that extraction from relative clauses is unacceptable in Icelandic.

It has been widely assumed that certain island violations are ameliorated by ellipsis. However, Merchant(2001) argues that the second part of the Coordinate Structure Constraint(CSC) in English is not a PF-island and thus its violations cannot be repaired/ameliorated. This paper aims to investigate the repairability of the CSC in Korean. It is shown that as in English, the second part of the CSC (ban on extraction out of conjuncts) is not repairable by ellipsis in Korean. I first show that constructing relevant data is evasive due to some confounding factors. However, I demonstrate that when these factors are carefully controlled for, the data invariably respect the CSC, yielding no repair effects. Comparing the CSC with the relative clause island, I suggest that while the relative clause may well constitute a PF-island, the CSC does not. I also argue that the relevant data are problematic for the in-situ ellipsis approach

It has been claimed that Korean allows the relativization of another relative clause, deriving the double relative clause. The presence of double relative clauses has led some researchers to argue that Korean relative clauses do not involve any operator movement, but instead involve a mechanism such as unselective binding (Sohn 1980, Y.-S. Kang 1986), where an operator binds variables in situ. In this squib, we argue that there is no true double relative clause, thus no real threat to the operator movement analysis for relative clauses in Korean. More specifically, we propose that double relative clauses are derived from double nominative constructions, through relativizing the first nominative NP that originates from an IP-adjoined position. Given our analysis, double relative clauses are not instances of island violations, and the operator movement analysis for relative clause formation in Korean can thus be maintained

Adjuncts and relative clauses are traditionally classified as strong islands for extraction across languages. However, the Mainland Scandinavian (MSc.) languages have been reported to differ from e.g., English in allowing extraction from adjunct and relative clauses. In order to investigate the distribution of possible island extractions in these languages based on naturally produced material, we conducted two exploratory corpus studies on adjunct and relative clause extraction in Danish and in English. Results suggest that both extraction from finite adjuncts and from relative clauses appears at a non-trivial rate in naturally produced Danish, which supports the claim that these structures are not strong islands in Danish. In English, we also found a non-trivial amount of examples displaying extraction from finite adjuncts, as well as a small number of cases of relative clause extraction. This finding presents a potential challenge to the claim that English differs from MSc. in never allowing extraction from strong islands. Furthermore, our results show that both languages appear to share certain trends that can be observed in the extraction examples regarding the type of extraction dependency, the type of adjunct clause featured in adjunct clause extraction, and the type of matrix predicate featured in relative clause extraction.

Since Ross (1969), it has been widely adopted that island violations are ameliorated by ellipsis. Recently, however, Merchant (2004, 2008, 2010) observes that some island-violations that are expected to be ameliorated by ellipsis are not. He claims that XPs that cross an island leave *-features on intermediate traces outside the island node and that island effects will be attested unless the *-features are all deleted. In this squib, however, we argue that Merchants account is not required and thus should not be adopted by showing that all of the examples Merchant presents can be fully accounted for by an independently motivated requirement, Parallelism (cf. Fox and Lasnik 2003). We also suggest that Chomskys (1972) analysis of islands, which has been refuted by many authors including Merchant (cf. Chung, Ladusaw, and McClosky 1995), can be resurrected as a viable one.

There is little consensus in the Japanese syntax literature on the question of whether complex NPs with a noun complement headed by toyuu ‘that.say’ are islands for NP-scrambling dependencies. To explore this question, we conducted two acceptability judgment experiments using the factorial definition of islands to test the status of noun complements, relative clauses (which are also complex NPs, and uniformly considered islands in the literature), and coordinated NP structures (which are also uniformly considered islands in the literature). Our first experiment yielded strong evidence that relative clauses and coordinated NPs are islands (as expected), and strong evidence that noun complements are not. Our second experiment also found strong evidence that relative clauses and coordinated NPs are islands, but yielded a small, non-significant, trend toward an effect with noun complements. Based on the sizes of our samples (89 and 90 participants, respectively), the sizes of the effects, and the details of the acceptability patterns, we conclude that noun complements in Japanese are not islands with respect to NP-scrambling. We also investigated between- and within-participant variability in our results. We observe no evidence of increased between-participant variability for noun complements relative to other islands, and no increase of within-participant variability for noun complements relative to scrambling out of (non-island) declarative CPs. Our results have consequences for a number of issues that have been encoded in current syntactic theories of island effects, including the correlation between syntactic constituent complexity and island status (e.g., number of bounding nodes or phase heads), and the correlation between complementizer deletion and island status (e.g., the complement/adjunct distinction).