Chapter published in:
Contemporary Trends in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics: Selected papers from the Hispanic Linguistic Symposium 2015
Edited by Jonathan E. MacDonald
[Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 15] 2018
► pp. 309–332

Extra-syntactic factors in the that-trace effect

| University of Southern Maine
| University of Illinois at Chicago
Using predictions from the Interface Hypothesis and the grammar of Spanish-English bilinguals, we test whether non-syntactic factors play a role in the that-trace effect. Though generally analyzed syntactically, some work on that-trace supports a syntax-prosody account (Kandybowicz, 2006). The Interface Hypothesis predicts that bilinguals will have difficulty with interface phenomena but not narrow syntax, such that testing bilinguals’ knowledge of that-trace provides a unique testing ground for comparing the two approaches. We demonstrate that bilinguals have the syntactic underpinnings necessary for both syntactic and syntax-prosody accounts of that-trace; however, they differ from the monolinguals with regard to that-trace, extending the phenomenon’s restriction on extraction to a new context, supporting a syntax-prosody account of that-trace.
Keywords: bilingualism, Interface Hypothesis, EPP, wh-questions, expletives, syntax-prosody interface, wh-question, wh-phrase, -trace effect, extraction, comp-trace effect, complementizer-trace effect, syntax-prosody interface, Interface Hypothesis, Extended Projection Principle, EPP, expletives
Published online: 14 February 2018
https://doi.org/10.1075/ihll.15.15hei
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