Vincent, Sichel, and Wagers in Languages

An update from Jake Vincent:

Ivy, Matt, and I had an article published in Languages recently (May 11). It’s based on the experimental work on English relative clauses (RCs) that started with my second QP and culminated in my dissertation. It presents experimental evidence that non-presuppositional environments affect a relative clause’s resistance to extraction even in English. In particular, (a) RCs inside of DPs serving as non-verbal predicates of a clause and RCs inside the nominal pivot of a there-existential give rise to a substantially reduced island effect (compared to extraction from a transitive object), and (b) RCs inside of transitive objects may give rise to a reduced island effect when the transitive verb is used in an existential way. The paper also describes what we believe to be a methodological innovation somewhat akin to priming by which the effects of discourse context on sentence acceptability can be measured without modifying the nature of the judgment task.

Congrats, Jake, Matt, and Ivy!