Moving away from the island: Extraction from adjunct clauses in Danish

This study aims to explore crosslinguistic variation in island sensitivity between Danish and English, specifically focusing on the extraction patterns of different types of adjunct clauses. Additionally, it investigates how context, dependency type, information structure and syntactic structure may impact the acceptability of extraction from adjunct clauses. The results indicate that Danish exhibits acceptability patterns similar to those found in Swedish and Norwegian regarding extraction from conditional and causal adjunct clauses. However, the raw scores of extraction from adjunct clauses are unexpectedly low in Danish. The study discusses potential explanations involving factors related to syntax, discourse function and processing but finds limitations in each approach and concludes that a fine-grained account is needed in order to capture the observed variability. This research contributes to a deeper understanding of island phenomena and highlights the need for investigation involving direct comparisons between languages.