Internally-headed and doubly-headed relatives in Japanese -- How are they related to each other?

Grosu & Hoshi (2019:20), in their rejoinder to Kitagawa (2019), propose that apparent violations of island constraints in the so-called internally-headed relative clauses are accounted for by considering them as reduced doubly-headed relative clauses. This paper shows that this claim by Grosu and Hoshi is not empirically sustainable, and further that it misses the discourse function of doubly-headed relative clauses. A discussion of gapless light-headed externally-headed relative clauses is also presented so as to identify how this construction type interrelates with internally-headed relative clauses and doubly-headed relative clauses.

Active Gap Filling and Island Constraint in Processing the Mandarin “Gap-Type” Topic Structure

There is a long-standing debate concerning whether Mandarin topic constructions are movement-derived and form a filler-gap dependency like the English-type topicalization. This ERP study explores this issue by testing whether island constraints, a diagnostic for movement, are actively observed during online processing of the Mandarin “gap-type” topic construction, an understudied area in Mandarin sentence processing research. Following the paradigm of Traxler and Pickering's 1996 study, we manipulated islandhood (relative clause island conditions vs. no island conditions) and plausibility, or whether the topic is a plausible object of the potential subcategorizing verb based on animacy fit (i.e., “greet a teacher” vs. “greet a file”) in a 2 × 2 design. We predict that any plausibility effect obtained for the non-island conditions would disappear for the island conditions if the parser observes the island constraint and avoids positing gaps inside an island. we observed a P600-previously found for animacy violations-for the non-island conditions but not for the island conditions. Additionally, we found a positive-going component occurring from 588 to 792 ms at the fronto-central site for the island condition at the potential gap site. While this novel ERP's interpretation is yet to be determined, it is unlikely to indicate any plausibility effect. Our findings suggest that the parser is sensitive to island constraints in online processing of the Mandarin “gap-type” topic structure, and lend support to the movement analysis for Mandarin topicalization.

Subject Gaps Revisited: Complement Clauses and Complementizer-Trace Effects

This study investigates how filler-gap dependencies associated with subject position are formed in online sentence comprehension. Since Crain and Fodor (1985), “filled-gap” studies have provided evidence that the parser actively seeks to associate a wh-filler with a gap in direct object position of a sentence wherever possible; the evidence that this same process applies for subject position, is, however, more limited (Stowe, 1986; Lee, 2004). We examine the processing of complement clauses, finding that wh dependency formation is actively attempted at embedded subject position (e.g., Kate in Who did Lucy think Kate could drive us home to?), unless, however, the embedded clause contains a complementizer (e.g., Who did Lucy think that Kate … .?). The absence of the dependency formation in the latter case demonstrates that the complementizer-trace effect (cf., ∗Who did Lucy think that could drive us home to mom?; Perlmutter, 1968) is, like syntactic island constraints (Ross, 1967; Keshev and Meltzer-Asscher, 2017), immediately operative in online structure building.

Island Constraints in English and Kurdish

In transformational grammar, there are rules such as relativization, questioning and topicalization, in which elements abandon their position and move to the front of the sentence. The present study focusses on certain islands in English and Kurdish and examines whether these islands constrain the extraction of elements in Kurdish or not. It is hypothesized that islandhood is not only bout the restrictions on the extraction of an element and putting it in front of the sentence. In Kurdish, even if the question word remains in-situ, there are islands that impose restrictions on forming structures such as interrogatives.

Extraction constraints

This chapter offers a detailed survey of the constraints that restrict filler-gap dependencies (island constraints), and argues that there are several different kinds of island constraints, due to different combinations of independently motivated factors. Most importantly, it argues that most islands are not cross-constructionally active. That is, most island phenomena are restricted to certain kinds of unbounded dependency constructions (e.g. interrogatives, or relative clauses). In particular, several island types are primarily caused by drawing the hearer’s attention to a fronted referent that is not at-issue, and is of little consequence to what the utterance convey. Such an account emerges naturally from the observation that not all propositions express equally likely states of affairs and that different constructions come with different biases with respect to how information structure is packaged, and consequently, to which referents it is pragmatically licit to single out. The chapter concludes with a discussion of resumption and supposed island effects in other types of construction.

Movement-based approaches

This chapter discusses how the Minimalist Program (MP) strives to model unbounded dependency constructions and island constraints, and discusses the empirical, theoretical and cognitive status of syntactic displacement (movement), as formalized in terms of Internal Merge. At the present time, modelling filler-gap dependencies via movement faces significant theoretical and empirical issues. There is no parsimonious account of successive cyclic movement in the MP because of the Triggering Problem, nor of convergent and cumulative filler-gap dependencies. Other problems concern island phenomena, which have been argued to follow from core architectural economy constraints, but which make incorrect predictions not only about islands, but also about unbounded dependency constructions more generally. Finally, the MP has also been difficult to reconcile with extant psycholinguistic evidence about language processing. All recent attempts to make the MP consistent with incremental sentence processing adopt phrase-structural information, and abandon movement altogether.

Deriving Chinese alternative questions

This study proposes an approach which derives Chinese alternative questions by means of feature percolation and LF movement. This approach is argued to fare better than a movement approach as proposed by C.-T. Huang (1998) and a non-movement binding approach as proposed by R.-H. Huang (2010) in that it may successfully explain why Chinese alternative questions are only sensitive to the wh-island constraint, but not to other types of island constraints. The LF movement analysis may receive empirical support from the observed fact that Chinese alternative questions exhibit focus-intervention effects, generally assumed to be induced by LF movement.