Frequency effects in Subject Islands

Abstract

This work provides evidence that Subject Island violation effects vanish if subject-embedded gaps are made as frequent and pragmatically felicitous as non-island counterpart controls. We argue that Subject Island effects are caused by the fact that subject-embedded gaps are pragmatically unusual – as the informational focus does not usually correspond to a dependant of the subject phrase – and therefore are highly contrary to comprehenders’ expectations about the distribution of filler–gap dependencies (Chaves 2013 , Hofmeister, Casasanto & Sag 2013 ). This not only explains why sentences with subject-embedded gaps often become more acceptable ‘parasitically’, in the presence of a second gap outside the island, but also explains why some Subject Island violations fail to exhibit any amelioration with repetition (Sprouse 2009 , Crawford 2011 , Goodall 2011 ); some ameliorate marginally (Snyder 2000 , 2017 ) or moderately (Hiramatsu 2000 , Clausen 2011 , Chaves & Dery 2014 ), and others become fully acceptable, as in our case. This conclusion extends to self-paced reading Subject Island studies (Stowe 1986 , Kurtzman & Crawford 1991 , Pickering, Barton & Shillcock 1994 , Phillips 2006 ), which sometimes find evidence of gap filling and sometimes do not.