Clausal doubling produces phantom islands

Abstract

Clausal doubling in Spanish seemingly displays “island effects”, i.e., the construction is unacceptable if the doubled clause is located within a syntactic island. In this paper, we argue that these restrictions are cases of phantom islands, that is, not the result of true syntactic island violations, but rather a byproduct of the information structure of the doubling pattern. We maintain that these effects arise from the dislocated clause being a contrastive topic. Concretely, we claim that in these cases, the sentence fails to address the immediate question under discussion presupposed by its contrastive topic. We show that this approach also accounts for the distribution of clausal doubling in embedding contexts.