Abstract
This study reflects on the meaning of the results of a self-paced grammaticality judgment task that tested island configurations (with gaps and resumptive pronouns) in L1 and L2 speakers of Spanish. Results indicated that resumptive pronouns do not rescue extractions from islands, as traditionally assumed in grammatical theory, and propose that islands are essentially an interpretative or processing matter, and not only a grammatical one, as in Kluender (1998). This study further challenges the L2 studies that proposed that L2 learners are fundamentally different from native speakers because they usually fail to reject island configurations, and shows that L2 learners are sensitive to the same processing and interpretative mechanisms that native speakers employ to parse island configurations. Generally speaking, this study proposes that apparent purely syntactic restrictions such as extractions from islands might not depend on their grammatical formation, but on other relevant factors such as plausibility, embedding, and processability, which together with grammatical well-formedness configure a more holistic and useful notion of linguistic acceptability.
Highlights
The concept of grammaticality has been of vital importance in the development of the field of modern linguistics, since Chomsky’s influential books, Syntactic Structures (Chomsky, 1957) and Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Chomsky, 1965)
We want to reflect on theacceptability of island configurations in both L1 and L2, and its relation to the availability to wh-movement in these grammars
The first main finding of this study is that native speakers, our control group, do not distinguish among island violations, and crucially, the resumptive pronoun does not improve the acceptance rates of these sentences
Summary
The concept of grammaticality has been of vital importance in the development of the field of modern linguistics, since Chomsky’s influential books, Syntactic Structures (Chomsky, 1957) and Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Chomsky, 1965). The study of what is possible and, crucially, what is not possible in a language has allowed us to deepen our knowledge on particular and universal properties of linguistic systems. In the field of Second Language Acquisition from a Generative Perspective (GenSLA), the notion of grammaticality has been essential in order to determine the nature of interlanguage grammars and to describe the implicit linguistic knowledge of a second language learner. Much of the debate in GenSLA during the 80s and 90s revolved around whether interlanguage grammars and native grammars are fundamentally similar or fundamentally different, and whether the former could access UG after the critical period of acquisition (for a summary, see White, 1989, 2003). Constraints on wh-movement, i.e.: Subjancency, have been taken as the ideal case to test the accessibility of interlanguage grammars to UG since they typically
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