Variation in adjunct islands: The case of Norwegian

Ingrid Bondevik,Terje Lohndal,Dave Kush

doi:10.1017/s0332586520000207

Abstract

AbstractFinite adjunct clauses are often assumed to be among the strongest islands for filler–gap dependency creation cross-linguistically, but Kush, Lohndal & Sprouse (2019) found experimental evidence suggesting that finite conditional om-adjunct clauses are not islands for topicalization in Norwegian. To investigate the generality of these findings, we ran three acceptability judgment experiments testing topicalization out of three adjunct clause types: om ‘if’, når ‘when’ and fordi ‘because’ in Norwegian. Largely replicating Kush et al. (2019), we find evidence for the absence of strong island effects with topicalization from om-adjuncts in all three experiments. We find island effects for når- and fordi-adjuncts, but the size of the effects and the underlying judgment distributions that produce those effects differ greatly by island type. Our results suggest that the syntactic category ‘adjunct’ may not constitute a suitably fine-grained grouping to explain variation in island effects.

Highlights

A common trait for natural languages is the ability to establish filler–gap dependencies between two elements across a distance in a sentence
We focus on two studies that investigated Norwegian: (i) Kush et al (2018), which tested the acceptability of wh-extraction from five islands types: ‘whether’, complex NP, subject, adjunct, and relative clause, and (ii) Kush et al (2019), which tested the acceptability of contrastive topicalization from the same five island types
Our experiments investigated the acceptability of contrastive topicalization dependencies from three adjunct types in Norwegian – om ‘if’, når ‘when’, and fordi ‘because’

Summary

Introduction

A common trait for natural languages is the ability to establish filler–gap dependencies between two elements across a distance in a sentence. In (1), the wh-words what/hva ‘what’ are interpreted as the object of the verbs fix/fikse ‘fix’ in the English and Norwegian sentences. What did Andreas think that Ole said that he probably could not fix _? Andreas that Ole said that he most sannsynlig ikke kunne fikse _?. Likely not could fix ‘What did Andreas think that Ole said that he probably could not fix?’. Filler–gap dependencies are unbounded, but there are constraints that limit the establishment of a dependency across certain domains. In the examples in (2), trying to link a wh-filler to a gap inside an adjunct clause renders the sentences unacceptable:

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Discussion

Conclusion