Relative clauses are islands in Japanese: The case of double relatives

• Published in: Natural language and linguistic theory
• Main Authors: Takahashi, Maho, Goodall, Grant
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 06.08.2025
• ISSN: 0167-806X; 1573-0859
• DOI: 10.1007/s11049-025-09677-1

Relative clauses have traditionally been thought to be islands for extraction, but counterexamples have long been noted. Here we examine one such counterexample, “double relatives” in Japanese, in which an element is relativized from inside another relative clause. These structures are commonly thought to be possible, because they allow for a derivation in which there is no extraction out of the relative clause, but we argue, based on three sentence acceptability experiments, that this is not correct. In the first experiment, we find that even in double relatives of high acceptability, there is a clear island effect in the form of a superadditive interaction between extraction and the type of embedded clause. In the second, we find that no interaction obtains when we change the dependency type by replacing the gap of relativization with an overt anaphor ( jibun ), suggesting that the interaction in the first experiment is truly due to relativization (Ā-movement). In the third, we show that an island effect obtains regardless of whether a subject or object is extracted and that there is no significant difference in the size of the effect in the two cases. Overall, our findings suggest that relativization out of a relative clause in Japanese does result in an island violation, despite initial appearances. The violation incurs only a small penalty for acceptability, though, and we suggest that the lower acceptability of some types of double relatives is due to an independently motivated processing bias that favors resolving object-gap dependencies before subject-gap dependencies.