Sluicing and subject islands: An experimental approach

• Published in: Glossa (London) Vol. 10; no. 1; pp. 1 - 30
• Main Authors: Palaz, Bilge, Bruening, Benjamin, Tollan, Rebecca
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Open Library of Humanities 2025; Ubiquity Press
• Subjects: Acceptability; Constraints; Copulas; Ellipsis; Grammatical subject; Islands; Linguistics; Reference (Semantic); Relative clauses; Special Collection: Data-driven analyses of ellipsis (mis)matches; Syntactic anaphora; Syntactic islands; Wh phrases; ellipsis source; sluicing; subject islands; regular sluicing; contrast sluicing
• ISSN: 2397-1835
• DOI: 10.16995/glossa.11054

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 thisoutcome 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 apossible approach for contrast sluicing, whatever the source of the subject island effect is, it disappears when the relevant structure is not pronounced.