I will present a series of experiments on the 'subject island' constraint, in English and French (Abeillé et al. 2020). We show that there is no subject penalty with pied piping in relative clauses (a car of which the color delighted the baseball player). We conclude that the subject penalty either comes from preposition stranding (in English) or from the discourse function of the construction (in English, French, Italian). I will also present some experiments on finite adjuncts in English (Liu et al. 2022) which also show that the adjunct penalty, if any, is sensitive to the discourse function of the construction.

• Abeillé, Anne, Barbara Hemforth, Elodie Winckel, and Edward Gibson. 2020. “Extraction from Subjects: Differences in Acceptability Depend on the Discourse Function of the Construction.” Cognition 204 (November): 104293. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104293.
• Liu, Yingtong, Elodie Winckel, Anne Abeillé, Barbara Hemforth, and Edward Gibson. 2022. “Structural, Functional, and Processing Perspectives on Linguistic Island Effects.” Annual Review of Linguistics 8 (1): 495–525. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-linguistics-011619-030319.

The event is financed by the School of Communication and Culture’s research programme for language, linguistics, and cognition.