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Acceptability model for BPPA constructions from Kehl (2021, p. 284); the factor scalar change corresponds to incrementality in this paper. Upwards arrows indicate a positive effect on acceptability, (double) downward arrows a negative effect.
Source publication
In this article, I will argue that many of the theoretical approaches to extraction from participle adjunct islands suffer from the fact that the focus of investigation lies on perceived grammaticality differences in interrogative structures. Following approaches which make an explicit connection between extraction asymmetries and properties of the...
Contexts in source publication
Context 1
... observation connects to the discussion above about the subtle acceptability differences in declarative BPPA constructions, which run the risk of being considered irrelevant, especially if the focus of the approach in question is in grammaticality rather than acceptability. The acceptability model can be graphically represented as in Figure 3, taken from Kehl (2021). This illustration shows the positive effects of durativity and incrementality with upward arrows, as well as the negative effect of transitivity with downward arrows; double downward arrows on the factor extraction indicate that this effect is stronger than the others. ...
Context 2
... might be related to a better match between the information-structural status of the adjunct constituent from which extraction takes place and the discourse function of relativization, as proposed in Abeillé et al. (2020). The visualization of the acceptability model in Figure 3 can be generalized by adding more extraction types than just wh-extraction, and by linking these different types of dependency formation to separate acceptability levels; this is shown in Figure 4, where relativization and topicalization are allowed for negative effects on acceptability that are not necessarily identical to that of wh-extraction. I will have to leave the relative magnitude of these effects for future experimental research. ...
Citations
... However, each of the ten contributions approach island phenomena from a distinctive angle. While some take a more theoretical approach (Culicover et al. 2022;Kehl 2022), others provide new corpus data (Müller and Eggers 2022;Engdahl and Lindahl 2022) or new experimental data (Chaves 2022;Engdahl and Lindahl 2022;Kobzeva et al. 2022;Nyvad et al. 2022;Snyder 2022;Vincent et al. 2022). ...
... In a similar vein, Kehl (2022) argues that it may not be necessary to make syntactic operations sensitive to semantic factors in accounts of participial adjunct islands. According to him, theory development in the realm of syntax should take into account relative acceptability differences in the underlying declaratives before positing licensing mechanisms for interrogative island structures. ...
In natural languages, syntactic elements can, in principle, be linked across an unbounded distance, as exemplified by filler-gap dependencies (also known as extractions or movement operations) [...]
... It seems reasonable to assume that the semantic plausibility of a proposition plays a role in connection with extractability. It is, of course, important that the corresponding declarative or non-extracted version of a sentence be plausible and felicitous (i.e., coherent) in order for extraction to be acceptable (see also Engdahl 1997;Kehl 2022). However, more specifically, the more prototypical and coherent the relations between the "semantic components" are, the easier it is to conceive of a referent as relevant to the main event and hence to extract it (Chaves and Putnam 2020, pp. ...
Adjunct clauses are traditionally assumed to be strong islands for extraction across languages. However, the universal island status of adjunct clauses has been challenged by studies showing that extraction is possible from finite adjunct clauses in the Mainland Scandinavian languages. The possibility of extraction in these languages appears to be affected by various factors, including the type of adjunct clause, the type of extraction dependency, and the presence of contextual facilitation. These findings call for a re-evaluation of the islandhood of adjunct clauses in English. We conducted an acceptability judgment study on relativization from three types of finite adjunct clauses in English (if-, when-, and because-clauses) in the presence of supporting context. We found that the three clause types showed rather non-uniform acceptability patterns: extraction from when- and because-clauses both yielded significantly lower ratings than extraction from if-clauses, which patterned with non-island that-clauses. Our results suggest that at least for relativization, if- and when-adjuncts are not invariably strong islands in English, and that extra-grammatical factors may be key in understanding island structures traditionally assumed to be purely syntactic in nature.
