Extraction from Coordinate Structures: Evidence from Language

1 Introduction Decades of psycholinguistic research have witnessed a sustained interest in whether syntactic island constraints are active during online processing the study of syntactic islands seeks to identify environments in which filler-gap dependencies are banned. But to these generalizations, there are, of course, exceptions. One of the more resilient island constraints is Ross's (1967) Coordinate Structure Constraint (CSC), although it, too, admits systematic counterexamples. The focus of this paper is on one such counterexample to the CSC – extraction from so-called 'pseudo-coordination' structures – and its treatment in online processing. At the center of this paper is the following long-recognized puzzle: why is the filler-gap dependency licensed in the pseudo-coordination structure (1a), but not the seemingly identical structure (1b)?