An Alternative Way to Read the Division of Labor between the Syntax Processor and the Discourse Processor

This paper examines factors that affect the acceptability of islands and ellipsis constructions and discusses how the division of labor between the syntax processor and the discourse processor in processing sluicing works. After investigating experiments on sluicing constructions from a processing perspective in Frazier and Clifton (2005) and Dickey and Bunger (2010), this paper proposes that downgraded acceptability of sprouting constructions with islands, which traditional syntactic accounts label as ungrammatical, is the result of processing difficulty in identifying dependencies between the sluice and its correlate. The continuity of acceptability of various sluicing constructions show that how the amount of information encoded in a correlate affects identification of sluice-correlate dependencies.