1887
Volume 38, Issue 1
  • ISSN 0929-7332
  • E-ISSN: 1569-9919
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Abstract

Abstract

Acceptability judgements of syntactic island violations are often claimed to improve by either increasing the complexity of the -filler phrase or integrating the violating sentence into a discourse. In two acceptability judgement tasks, we looked at -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 -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.

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/content/journals/10.1075/avt.00047.bel
2021-10-29
2024-10-07
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  • Article Type: Research Article
Keyword(s): context; D-linking; filler complexity; island constraints; relativized minimality
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