Backgroundedness Predicts Island Status of Non-finite Adjuncts in English

Savithry Namboodiripad; Nicole Cuneo; Mathew A. Kramer; Yourdanis Sedarous; Yushi Sugimoto; Felicia Bisnath; Adele E. Goldberg

Backgroundedness Predicts Island Status of Non-finite Adjuncts in English

Savithry Namboodiripad, Nicole Cuneo, Mathew A. Kramer, Yourdanis Sedarous, Yushi Sugimoto, Felicia Bisnath, Adele E. Goldberg

Research output: Contribution to conference › Paper › peer-review

3 Scopus citations

Abstract

The current work tests the hypothesis that the island status of clausal adjuncts, as determined by judgments on wh-questions, are predicted by the degree of “backgroundedness” of the adjuncts, as determined by a separate negation task. Results of two experiments support the hypothesis that acceptability of extraction from adjuncts in wh-questions is inversely correlated with the degree to which the adjunct is backgrounded in discourse. Taken together, results show that temporal clausal adjuncts (headed by before, after, while) are stronger islands than adjuncts that are causal (here, headed by to or by). This demonstrates that adjuncts differ in degree of island status, depending on their meaning, despite parallel syntactic structure.

Original language	English (US)
Pages	1087-1093
Number of pages	7
State	Published - 2022
Event	44th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Cognitive Diversity, CogSci 2022 - Toronto, Canada Duration: Jul 27 2022 → Jul 30 2022

Conference

Conference	44th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Cognitive Diversity, CogSci 2022
Country/Territory	Canada
City	Toronto
Period	7/27/22 → 7/30/22

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

Artificial Intelligence
Computer Science Applications
Human-Computer Interaction
Cognitive Neuroscience

Keywords

backgroundedness
communication
discourse constraints
islands

Cite this

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title = "Backgroundedness Predicts Island Status of Non-finite Adjuncts in English",

abstract = "The current work tests the hypothesis that the island status of clausal adjuncts, as determined by judgments on wh-questions, are predicted by the degree of “backgroundedness” of the adjuncts, as determined by a separate negation task. Results of two experiments support the hypothesis that acceptability of extraction from adjuncts in wh-questions is inversely correlated with the degree to which the adjunct is backgrounded in discourse. Taken together, results show that temporal clausal adjuncts (headed by before, after, while) are stronger islands than adjuncts that are causal (here, headed by to or by). This demonstrates that adjuncts differ in degree of island status, depending on their meaning, despite parallel syntactic structure.",

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AU - Namboodiripad, Savithry

AU - Cuneo, Nicole

AU - Kramer, Mathew A.

AU - Sedarous, Yourdanis

AU - Sugimoto, Yushi

AU - Bisnath, Felicia

AU - Goldberg, Adele E.

PY - 2022

Y1 - 2022

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AB - The current work tests the hypothesis that the island status of clausal adjuncts, as determined by judgments on wh-questions, are predicted by the degree of “backgroundedness” of the adjuncts, as determined by a separate negation task. Results of two experiments support the hypothesis that acceptability of extraction from adjuncts in wh-questions is inversely correlated with the degree to which the adjunct is backgrounded in discourse. Taken together, results show that temporal clausal adjuncts (headed by before, after, while) are stronger islands than adjuncts that are causal (here, headed by to or by). This demonstrates that adjuncts differ in degree of island status, depending on their meaning, despite parallel syntactic structure.

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Backgroundedness Predicts Island Status of Non-finite Adjuncts in English

Abstract

Conference

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

Keywords

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