Open AccessIsland constraints are not the result of sentence processing
Author(s) -
Helen Goodluck,
Frank Tsiwah,
Kofi K. Saah
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
proceedings of the linguistic society of america
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2473-8689
DOI - 10.3765/plsa.v2i0.4068
Subject(s) - sentence , phrase , computer science , linguistics , sentence processing , natural language processing , artificial intelligence , word (group theory) , inverted sentence , mechanism (biology) , philosophy , epistemology
On the basis of a comparison between sentence judgements in English vs. Akan, we argue that island constraints (positions to which a question word can be linked) cannot be reduced to the effects of the sentence processing mechanism. Questions that violate constraints are judged better in Akan than in English, although the challenge to the sentence processor is the same for the two languages. We argue specifically that the constraints cannot be reduced to the effects of specificity of the question phrase, and must be attributed to two different grammatical mechanisms for the languages.