Sluicing, islands and sentence processing
Date
2023
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
This dissertation presents research that aims to make new contributions to the study of sluicing (more broadly, ellipsis) and to the study of (extra-)grammatical constraints in language that are attested in sluicing settings. These two topics are currently understudied, particularly from the perspective of experimental syntax. I thus apply quantitative methods, first, to enhance our understanding of sluicing regarding its unpronounced source, of islands regarding the status of subject islands as grammatical constraints, and I further examine how sluicing and subject islands interact. In a series of experiments, I first provide new evidence for strict syntactic isomorphism in one form of sluicing – contrast sluicing. In view of syntactic isomorphism, I test the nature of subject islands in contrast sluicing, where the findings point that subject island effects cannot be due to purely structural restrictions. ☐ Second, a set of sentence processing constraints that have so far been reserved for ellipsis constructions are re-evaluated in this dissertation. This is achieved by exploring processing of sluicing and sluicing-like sentences in a language different from English, which is Turkish. Findings of a self-paced reading experiment conducted in Turkish attest one factor (i.e., Locality, or linear distance) to impact processing of both sluicing and sentences that are minimally different from sluicing. Findings further suggest that processing is not conditioned by the way the sentence is structured or the forms of the words as long as there is a strong match in meaning between the two parts of a sluicing-like sentence in Turkish.
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Keywords
Contrast sluicing, Locality, Parallelism, Satiation, Sluicing, Subject islands