Abstract
Subject extractions have often been presumed to be unlike other extractions. This has some support from the fact that the subject argument is often given a special status within grammatical theory. This paper discusses this possibility from a psycholinguistic perspective, arguing that if subject extractions are unusual, then this should have an effect on the way they are processed. If there is evidence that this is not so, then we would have evidence that a correct linguistic treatment of subject extractions will not be distinct from the treatment of other extractions (such as object extractions). We describe an experiment concerned with the processing of subject extractions and discuss the results in the context of a range of grammatical theories. In contrast to most psycholinguistic work on unbounded dependencies, we consider the possiblity that the grammar underlying processing may not involve any traces, and hence that no specific ‘gap-filling’ mechanism is used in the analysis of unbounded dependencies.1
We would like to thank Guy Barry, Matt Crocker, Elisabet Engdahl, Helen Goodluck and Mike Rochemont for comments on earlier drafts of this paper, and Ros Crawley, Marion England, Kate Gillen, David Kleinman, Kerry Sims and Rosemary Stevenson for help with the experiment. We acknowledge the support of ESRC grants C00428722002 and R000231396.
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Pickering, M., Shillcock, R. (1992). Processing Subject Extractions. In: Goodluck, H., Rochemont, M. (eds) Island Constraints. Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, vol 15. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1980-3_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1980-3_11
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
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