The effect of filler complexity and context on the acceptability of wh-island violations in
Dutch
Acceptability judgements of syntactic island violations are often claimed to improve by either increasing the
complexity of the
wh-filler phrase or integrating the violating sentence into a discourse. In two acceptability
judgement tasks, we looked at
wh-island violations in Dutch by varying the complexity of the filler phrase and by
presenting the sentences either in isolation or with a preceding discourse. We found that neither variable had a significant
effect in isolation, but that only in their combination a significant effect was observed. The same effect showed up in non-island
conditions, however. This is in contrast to findings in the literature on English and French and suggests that the complexity
effect in Dutch is not syntactic. We therefore conclude that
wh-islands are strong islands in Dutch (
Broekhuis & Corver 2015) and show that the contrast with English and French can be
made to follow from featural Relativized Minimality (
Rizzi 2017), taking into account
the verb second property of Dutch.
Article outline
- 1.Amelioration effects in island violations
- 2.Experiment 1
- Participants
- Design and materials
- Procedure
- Data analysis
- Results
- 3.Experiment 2
- Participants
- Design and materials
- Procedure
- Data analysis
- Results
- 4.General discussion
- Acknowledgments
- Note
-
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