Rethinking the real-time status of island phenomena

Based on his experimental work on the real-time status of a subject island, Phillips (2006) claims that the human language processor can notice possible and impossible parasitic gap positions in real time, from which he concludes that attempts to account for the subject island from a processing perspective is not valid and that the nature of the subject island is syntactic. In this paper, I will critically examine Phillips’s analysis and show that the processing approach can also (and probably better) account for the results of his experiments.

1. Introduction

2. Basics of parasitic gap

3. Phillips (2006)

4. Problems of Phillips (2006)

5. An alternative account

6. Conclusion

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