Fragments and island (in) sensitivity in Turkish

Abstract

It is well-known that long-distance dependencies are a hallmark of the human language faculty. We see this in (1) for English and (2) for Turkish. In (1), the wh-phrase originates within the embedded clause, where it is assigned its theta role, but appears in the matrix clause, establishing a long-distance dependency. Similarly, in (2), the object NP in the embedded clause has been scrambled to the sentence-initial position.