Extraction from finite adjunct clauses: an investigation of relative clause dependencies in Norwegian

Abstract

Recent experiments have confirmed earlier informal evidence that finite adjuncts are not islands categorically. Specifically, it has been shown that adjuncts are not necessarily islands for all dependency types (Sprouse et al. 2016), and that the island status of an adjunct depends on the type of the adjunct clause in question (Kush et al. 2019; Müller 2019; Bondevik et al. 2021; Nyvad et al. 2022). The current study further explores these questions by testing three different adjunct clause types: Clauses introduced by om ‘if’, fordi ‘because’ and når ‘when’, in a relative clause (rc) dependency in Norwegian. We find that forming an rc-dependency into a finite adjunct in Norwegian overall causes island effects, but that there are fine-grained differences within the category ‘adjunct’. Specifically, we find that fordi ‘because’ and når ‘when’ yield large island effects, while om ‘if’, on a par with Kobzeva et al. (2022) and Nyvad et al. (2022), yields intermediate results. Rather than relying on binary distinctions only, we argue that any theory that is to explain the empirical landscape must be sufficiently fine-grained and allow for gradient distinctions.

Keywords

• Adjunct islands
• Relative clause dependencies
• Norwegian
• Conditional if
• Gradience
• Variation