EXPERIMENTAL PERSPECTIVE ON ISLAND CONSTRAINTS

The paper introduces a new project studying island constraints in Russian with experimental methods. The project has several descriptive, theoretical and methodological objectives. As for the descriptive aspect, we have identified a clear dearth of inquiry in this area: theoretically oriented papers contain contradictory data (e.g. on extraction out of chto and kak clauses, on the operationality of the complementizer-trace effect, or on superiority effects in multiple wh-fronting in Russian), and several important issues (e.g. parameters of weak islands, intrusive pronouns in islands and non-island structures) are not covered at all in the literature. The theoretical perspective on islands involves their characterization as grammatical constraints or performance phenomena such as an excessive burden on the cognitive systems exploited in the parsing process. An interesting methodological issue is the intralingual variation and the co-existence of multiple individual grammars within a linguistic community, which yields inconsistent judgments on the acceptability of island constructions by respondents.