Recent research suggests that island effects may vary as a function of dependency type, potentially challenging accounts that treat island effects as reflecting uniform constraints on all filler-gap dependency formation. Some authors argue that cross-dependency variation is more readily accounted for by discourse-functional constraints that take into account the discourse status of both the filler and the constituent containing the gap. We ran a judgment study that tested the acceptability of wh-extraction and relativization from nominal subjects, embedded questions (EQs), conditional adjuncts, and existential relative clauses (RCs) in Norwegian. The study had two goals: (i) to systematically investigate cross-dependency variation from various constituent types and (ii) to evaluate the results against the predictions of the Focus Background Conflict constraint (FBCC). Overall we find some evidence for cross-dependency differences across extraction environments. Most notably wh-extraction from EQs and conditional adjuncts yields small but statistically significant island effects, but relativization does not. The differential island effects are potentially consistent with the predictions of the FBCC, but we discuss challenges the FBCC faces in explaining finer-grained judgment patterns.

Norwegian allows filler-gap dependencies into relative clauses (RCs) and embedded questions (EQs) – domains that are usually considered islands. We conducted a corpus study on youth-directed reading material to assess what direct evidence Norwegian children receive for filler-gap dependencies into islands. Results suggest that the input contains examples of Filler-gap dependencies into both RCs and EQs, but such examples are significantly less frequent than long-distance filler-gap dependencies into non-island clauses. Moreover, evidence for island violations is characterized by the absence of forms that are, in principle, acceptable in the target grammar. Thus, although they encounter dependencies into islands, children must generalize beyond the fine-grained distributional characteristics of the input to acquire the full pattern of island-insensitivity in their target language. We conclude by considering how different learning models would fare on acquiring the target generalizations.

Occasional, odd and rare are different from other frequency adjectives (such as daily or frequent) in that they are able to pluralize a verbal event outside its immediate scope. While attempts have been made to capture this association to the event (Morzycki 2016; Gehrke & McNally 2011, 2015; Gehrke 2021; Schäfer 2007; Zimmermann 2003; Stump 1981; Sæbø 2016; Bücking 2012), none of them capture all the relevant empirical facts, namely that these sentences are distributive, stage-level and can optionally involve a verbal or a nonverbal event plurality. We present an analysis in which occasional-type frequency adjectives quantify over stages, following Barker’s (1999) definition of a stage as an ordered pair of an event and an individual <e,x>. This analysis better accounts for the data and leads to a larger discussion of the nature of stages.