Linguistics Colloquium Series - Dr. Rebecca Tollan, University of Delaware

Long-distance dependency restrictions across languages and constructions: A Discourse-to-Syntax Grounding account. 

This talk bridges two sides of an ongoing debate in syntactic and psycholinguistic literature about why long-distance dependencies (LDDs) cannot occur in certain environments, called “islands” (Ross, 1967). The crux of current debate is over whether island constraints arise from (i) discourse principles (e.g., Abeillé et al., 2020; Cuneo & Goldberg, 2023; Winckel et al., 2025), or (ii) constraints on syntactic representation (e.g., Sprouse, Wagers & Phillips, 2012; Shen & Lim, 2025). I argue for a new hybrid approach called Discourse-to-Syntax Grounding. This proposal is rooted in typological data on a cross-linguistically widespread type of LDD restriction not found in Indo-European languages, called syntactic ergativity. I propose that both island constraints and syntactic ergativity are rooted in principles of information packaging (hence their arising mostly in wh questions and focus clefts), but that these discourse-grounded restrictions can conventionalize to other types of LDD environments (e.g., relative clauses), via syntactic mechanisms. 

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