Two (non-) islands in Slovenian

ǂa ǂstudy in experimental syntax

Arthur Stepanov (Author), Manca Mušič (Author), Penka Stateva (Author)

Abstract

There exists a controversy in the literature and among the speakers of Slovenian concerning the grammaticality of wh-island and subject island constructions in this language. We conducted an acceptability rating study of wh-islands and subject islands in Slovenian, using the factorial definition of island. This definition provides for a possibility to isolate a true island effect while controlling for two complexity factors that potentially interfere in speakers’ evaluation of the relevant sentences: the length of the respective movement dependency and the presence of an island structure itself. We found that (i) Slovenian speakers do judge the wh-island sentences worse than the respective controls, but the observed degradation cannot be attributed to a true island effect; (ii) subject extraction out of a wh-island leads to a so called reverse island effect whereby the acceptability is higher than expected even if the above two complexity factors are taken into consideration; and (iii) speakers are sensitive to the subject island effect, as predicted by the mainstream theories of syntactic locality. The results of our study contribute to establishing a solid empirical base for further theoretical investigations of the island effects and raise new questions about the role of processing factors in speakers’ evaluations of island constructions.

Keywords

syntactic island;experimental syntax;subjacency;Empty Category Principle;Slovenian;

Data

Language:	English
Year of publishing:	2018
Typology:	1.01 - Original Scientific Article
Organization:	UNG - University of Nova Gorica
UDC:	81'36
COBISS:	5165819
ISSN:	0024-3949
Views:	3521
Downloads:	0
Average score:	0 (0 votes)
Metadata:

Other data

URN:	URN:SI:UNG
Type (COBISS):	Not categorized
Pages:	str. 435-476
Volume:	ǂVol. ǂ56
Issue:	ǂno. ǂ3
Chronology:	2018
DOI:	10.1515/ling-2018-0002
ID:	10940539