ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the processing of unbounded dependencies such as “whom does Fred think Mary loves?”. It seeks to determine whether a first-resort strategy is employed in normal reading, and whether such a strategy is affected by the “island” constraints on possible unbounded dependencies. The first part of the chapter discusses theoretical and experimental evidence that suggests that a first-resort strategy is used in processing unbounded dependencies. Indeed, the processor appears to set up the dependency immediately when the subcategorizer is reached, before the purported trace location. However, this processing evidence does not resolve the issue of how island-constraint information is employed. We then describe some experimental evidence that supports the claim that the first-resort strategy is employed in normal reading, and suggests that much island-constraint information is in fact ignored during initial processing.
