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Evidence For a Discourse Account of Manner-of-Speaking Islands

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2026

Jiayi Lu ,
Dingyi Pan  and
Judith Degen
Jiayi Lu*
Affiliation:
Northwestern University
Dingyi Pan*
Affiliation:
University of California, San Diego
Judith Degen*
Affiliation:
Stanford University
*
Lu, Department of Linguistics, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208, [jiayi.lu@northwestern.edu]
Pan, Department of Linguistics, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093, [dipan@ucsd.edu]
Degen, Department of Linguistics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, [judithdegen@gmail.com]
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Abstract

Sentences with syntactic movement out of sentential complements of manner-of-speaking (MoS) verbs (e.g. whisper, shout) are degraded in acceptability, an effect called the manner-of-speaking (MoS) island effect. Accounts variably attribute the MoS island effect to the violation of the subjacency condition, to the low frequency of MoS verbs taking sentential complements, or to a general information-structural constraint that discourse-backgrounded constituents cannot be extracted. In five acceptability judgment experiments, we find that the MoS island effect can be modulated by foregrounding or backgrounding the extracted constituent, suggesting a causal relationship between discourse backgroundedness and this effect. Our findings challenge syntactic and frequency accounts of the MoS island effect.

Keywords

manner-of-speaking verbsisland effectslong-distance dependencybackgrounded-nessinformation structure

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Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 101 , Issue 4 , December 2025 , pp. 627 - 659
Copyright
Copyright © 2025 Linguistic Society of America

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