## The puzzle ##
One of the basic properties of natural language that linguists must explain—one of two facts Chomsky et al. (2019) call “non-negotiable” parts of any linguistic theory—is displacement, namely the fact that words can be interpreted as if they occupied a position other than where they are pronounced, as in (1).
(1) What did you read ______?
What is especially puzzling about displacement is that there are many cases where it seems like it should be possible, but it is not. For example, (2) is possible, but not (3).
(2) What did you read a book about ______?
(3) * What did you read Gretchen’s book about ______?
(cf. I read Gretchen’s book about Internet language.)
Constructions that prohibit displacement are called syntactic islands, and they have been the topic of intense research since the term was coined by Ross (1967), yet many puzzles remain (see Boeckx 2012; Citko 2016; Szabolcsi & Lohndal 2017 for an overview). One puzzle has to do with cross-linguistic variation: some islands appear to be universal, but others vary by language. For instance, English 'whether' is an island to displacement (4), but the Spanish equivalent 'si' is not (5).
(4) * Who don’t you know whether ______read a book?
(5) ¿ Quién no sabes si ______ leyó un libro?
who no you.know whether read a book
‘Who don’t you know whether read a book?’
In the last ten years, the experimental investigation of syntactic islands has undergone a boom, with the establishment of a widely accepted experimental protocol developed by Sprouse and colleagues (Sprouse et al. 2016; Sprouse, Wagers & Phillips 2012) for isolating the effects of islands on sentence judgments. Yet despite the boom, many open questions remain about the nature of island effects and their cross-linguistic variation.
We aim to fill this gap by using formal acceptability judgment experiment to test syntactic islands in Spanish, English, and Spanish/English code-switching.
## The project ##
This project is proceeding in phases. We will first test several island types in Mexican Spanish to further understand how islands behave in Spanish, a language that remains understudied in this regard (Pañeda et al. 2020).
Building on our initial study of Spanish, we will then construct an experiment focused on islands in Spanish/English code-switching (the use of both Spanish and English in a single sentence). Code-switching can be especially useful to linguistic theory because its combination of lexical items from more than one language can reveal syntactic restrictions that are not apparent in monolingual data (González-Vilbazo & López 2011, 2012; Hoot & Ebert 2021a, 2021b). This second phase will also include additional data collection on islands in monolingual English and monolingual Spanish.
## References ##
Boeckx, Cedric. 2012. *Syntactic islands*. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Chomsky, Noam, Ángel J. Gallego & Dennis Ott. 2019. Generative Grammar and the Faculty of Language: Insights, Questions, and Challenges. *Catalan Journal of Linguistics*. 229. doi:10.5565/rev/catjl.288.
Citko, Barbara. 2016. *Islands*. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/obo/9780199772810-0101.
González-Vilbazo, Kay & Luis López. 2011. Some properties of light verbs in code-switching. *Lingua* 121(5). 832–850. doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2010.11.011.
González-Vilbazo, Kay & Luis López. 2012. Little v and parametric variation. *Natural Language & Linguistic Theory* 30(1). 33–77. doi:10.1007/s11049-011-9141-5.
Hoot, Bradley & Shane Ebert. 2021a. On the position of subjects in Spanish: Evidence from code-switching. *Glossa: a journal of general linguistics* 6(1). 73. doi:10.5334/gjgl.1449.
Hoot, Bradley & Shane Ebert. 2021b. The That-Trace Effect: Evidence from Spanish–English Code-Switching. *Languages* 6(4). 189. doi:10.3390/languages6040189.
Pañeda, Claudia, Sol Lago, Elena Vares, João Veríssimo & Claudia Felser. 2020. Island effects in Spanish comprehension. *Glossa: a journal of general linguistics* 5(1). 21. doi:10.5334/gjgl.1058.
Ross, John Robert. 1967. *Constraints on variables in syntax*. Massachusetts Institute of Technology Dissertation. https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/15166.
Sprouse, Jon, Ivano Caponigro, Ciro Greco & Carlo Cecchetto. 2016. Experimental syntax and the variation of island effects in English and Italian. *Natural Language & Linguistic Theory* 34(1). 307–344. doi:10.1007/s11049-015-9286-8.
Sprouse, Jon, Matt Wagers & Colin Phillips. 2012. A test of the relation between working-memory capacity and syntactic island effects. *Language* 88(1). 82–123. doi:10.1353/lan.2012.0004.
