Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Each grammatical construction has its own function, and typically multiple constructions are combined to express a message. When the functions of two constructions conflict in a way that cannot be reconciled, their combination is judged ungrammatical. Here we consider one such type of case: “syntactic island violations.” Specifically, we consider combinations of wh-questions with 11 other constructions. Wh-questions request direct information about a particular constituent. Using a new Discourse task, we quantify how directly 11 constructions convey information in simple declarative sentences. Results demonstrate acceptability judgments on the wh-questions correlate with the degree to which the 11 constructions convey information directly. Thus, we argue that degrees of unacceptability of “island violations” result from the extent to which the discourse functions of the constructions involved conflict (N=240).