Syntactic island effects in Spanish: Experimental evidence

Syntactic islands offer a window into core properties of language, and understanding cross-linguistic variation in islands is central to elucidating these properties. One language claimed not to instantiate several common wh-island restrictions is Spanish; yet recent experimental work has raised doubts about these claims. We address methodological and empirical gaps in the literature on cross-linguistic variation of island effects with an acceptability judgment experiment designed to provide a comprehensive view of wh-islands in Spanish. We observe large island effects for extraction over wh-adjuncts (like por qué ‘why’) and wh-arguments (like quién ‘who’), and smaller effects for extraction over whether (si). Moving beyond the group-level effects, we carefully examine score distributions and the role of individual variation in sentence judgments to conclude wh-arguments and wh-adjuncts show distributions consistent with islandhood, while apparent effects for si ‘whether’ islands may have an extra-grammatical source. Thus, Spanish in fact exhibits island effects, contra previous claims, yet also differs from some other languages in permitting extraction in some cases. Accounting for this variation is crucial for linguistic theory, and our results present challenges to major theoretical approaches to islands. Furthermore, with the increasingly central role of experimental methods to syntactic theory, our work’s careful consideration of methods and analysis contributes to a necessary discussion about the scope of interpretation in experimental syntax.