Sluicing and subject islands: An experimental approach
| Author(s) | Palaz, Bilge | |
| Author(s) | Bruening, Benjamin | |
| Author(s) | Tollan, Rebecca | |
| Date Accessioned | 2025-03-19T18:59:48Z | |
| Date Available | 2025-03-19T18:59:48Z | |
| Publication Date | 2025-01-30 | |
| Description | This article was originally published in Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics. The version of record is available at: https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.11054. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by the Open Library of Humanities. © 2025 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. | |
| Abstract | This paper investigates how sluicing in English interacts with islandhood (Ross, 1967), focusing on how the subject island constraint applies under both regular sluicing (with an indefinite correlate) and contrast sluicing (with a focused correlate). We conducted three experiments. Experiment 1 examined what the structure of the elided clause is, by having participants choose a possible continuation. We found different patterns for regular sluicing versus contrast sluicing, with contrast sluicing exhibiting a strong preference for syntactic parallelism with the antecedent clause. Regular sluicing, in contrast, preferred a non-parallel continuation (a copular clause), consistent with evasion approaches to island repair under sluicing (e.g., Barros et al., 2014). Next, Experiment 2 examined the sensitivity of sluicing to island effects. Strikingly, contrast sluicing did not demonstrate notable acceptability degradations when subject islands were involved (contra predictions made by Barros et al., 2014; Griffiths & Lipták, 2014; Merchant, 2008), but we did find an overall degradation in contrast sluicing in comparison to regular sluicing. Because this outcome challenges previous assertions regarding the sensitivity of contrast sluicing to island constraints, Experiment 3 asked whether the subject island effect is truly at play in embedded wh questions. We found that – like with matrix questions but unlike with relative clauses (Abeillé et al., 2020) – subject island effects do emerge in embedded interrogatives. Since evasion is not a possible approach for contrast sluicing, whatever the source of the subject island effect is, it disappears when the relevant structure is not pronounced. | |
| Citation | Palaz, B., Bruening, B. & Tollan, R., (2025) “Sluicing and subject islands: An experimental approach”, Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 10(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.11054 | |
| ISSN | 2397-1835 | |
| URL | https://udspace.udel.edu/handle/19716/35963 | |
| Language | en_US | |
| Publisher | Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics | |
| dc.rights | Attribution 4.0 International | en |
| dc.rights.uri | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ | |
| Keywords | sluicing | |
| Keywords | regular sluicing | |
| Keywords | contrast sluicing | |
| Keywords | ellipsis source | |
| Keywords | subject islands | |
| Title | Sluicing and subject islands: An experimental approach | |
| Type | Article |
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