Access Provided by University Of Maryland @ College Park at 12/06/10 3:26PM GMT THE REAL-TIME STATUS OF ISLAND PHENOMENA

In parasitic-gap constructions an illicit gap inside a syntactic island becomes acceptable in combination with an additional licit gap, a result that has interesting implications for theories of grammar. Such constructions hold even greater interest for the question of the relation between grammatical knowledge and real-time language processing. This article presents results from two experiments on parasitic-gap constructions in English in which the parasitic gap appears inside a subject island, before the licensing gap. An off-line study confirms that parasitic gaps are acceptable when they occur inside the infinitival complement of a subject NP, but not when they occur inside a finite relative clause. An on-line self-paced reading study using a plausibility manipulation technique shows that incremental positing of gaps inside islands occurs in just those environments where parasitic gaps are acceptable. The fact that parasitic gaps are constructed incrementally in language processing presents a challenge for attempts to explain subject islands as epiphenomena of constraints on language processing and also helps to resolve apparent conflicts in previous studies of the role of island constraints in parsing.* 1. INTRODUCTION. This article is concerned with the relation between grammatical knowledge and the processes involved in real-time language processing. Grammatical theories have typically aimed at accounting for patterns of acceptability judgments, while remaining relatively agnostic about the real-time processes involved in speaking, understanding, and making acceptability judgments. Nevertheless, the role of grammatical constraints in real-time language processes is important from a number of different perspectives. For theories of language processing, it is important to know the extent to which real-time mechanisms reflect the details of grammar. For theories of well-formedness, it is important to know whether some constraints derive from limitations on language processing. And for theories that aim to minimize the distinction between grammatical knowledge and real-time processes, it is important to validate the prediction that real-time processes are grammatically accurate. This article presents evidence about the processing of island constraints on long-distance dependencies that indicates a high degree of grammatical sophistication in real-time language processing and presents a challenge for the view that island constraints ultimately derive from constraints on processing. The syntactic dependencies formed by topicalization, relativization, or WH-question formation are potentially unbounded in length, but are also subject to a number of restrictions. For example, a direct object WH-phrase may form a dependency with the verb that assigns its thematic role across arbitrarily many clauses (1), but such …