Island effects and amelioration by resumption in Jordanian Arabic: An auditory acceptability-judgment study

Abstract

This study brings evidence from Jordanian Arabic, a primarily spoken grammatical-resumption language, into the (formal-experimental) empirical base of both theories of island effects and theories of island amelioration by resumption. We report four auditory judgment studies exploring two dependency types and four island types with a gap or resumption in the tail of the dependency, yielding 16 distinct quantified effects. Our experiments identified two notable sources of variation: variation across dependency types in the sets of island effects that occur with gaps and variation across island types in amelioration by resumption. We discuss the challenges these results raise for four major classes of theories of island effects, and we point to paths forward for each. We also discuss the consequences of the variation in amelioration for theories of the source of resumption, concluding that both base generation and movement must be available options to learners of Jordanian Arabic. We also observe some evidence of individual variation in the availability of resumption across dependency types that could be explored in future studies.