An Empirical Investigation of Mandarin Island Constraints

Résumé En

Syntactic approach: subject penalty in Exp 1 and 2 (subject island), and also subject penalty in Exp 3 if there is covert movement in Mandarin wh-in-situ questions. • Processing approach: shorter linear distance between filler and gap might favor extraction from subjects in Exp1, Exp 2 and Exp 3. • Discourse approach: If most subjects are backgrounded, focalized elements cannot be extracted (a subject penalty when extracting focalized wh-elements in all experiments). Constraints on long-distance dependencies have been crucial for linguistic theories, with three main approaches: • Syntactic approach: "Island" constraints are syntactic in nature and should generalize across languages and across constructions (e.g. Huang 1982, Chomsky 1986). Extraction from subjects is more difficult than extraction from objects (subject island) • Processing approach: Processing factors such as low frequency and high working memory load play a role (Klunder 1991, Hofmeister & Sag 2010) • Discourse-based approach: Based on Goldberg (2006, 2013)'s "Backgrounded Constructions are Islands", Abeillé et al (2020) propose that the discourse function of the construction plays a role: the infelicity to extract an element out of a backgrounded constituent is worse when the extracted element is focalized (as in wh-questions or it-clefts). If most subjects clauses are backgrounded, it is unfelicitous to extract out of them with a focalizing construction. Previous Studies Mao et al.(2022) compared topicalization from Mandarin if/that clause, not finding adjunct penalty. Mao et al. (2022) conducted an experiment about sub-extraction from subjects and objects in Mandarin relative clauses, and did not find a subject penalty.