Syntactic islands and focality in Russian
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2023/14/0022/000616Keywords:
Syntactic islands, Information structure, RussianAbstract
One approach to syntactic islands appeals to information structure as an explanation. According to Goldberg (2006), backgrounded constructions are islands (BCI). The goal of this paper is to test the BCI hypothesis for Russian. Following Ambridge & Goldberg (2008), I concentrate on extraction out of the complements of three groups of verbs (light verbs, manner-of-speaking verbs, factive verbs) to see whether the acceptability judgements for extraction correlate with the potential interpretation of the corresponding element as being in focus. Results indeed show a strong and significant correlation (r = 0.68, p = 0.0144), providing support for the BCI hypothesis.
References
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