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Mainland Scandinavian languages have been reported to allow movement from embedded questions, relative clauses, and complex NPs—domains commonly considered to be islands crosslinguistically. Yet in formal acceptability studies Scandinavian participants often show ‘island effects’: they reject island-violating movement similarly to native speakers of ‘island-sensitive’ languages. To investigate this apparent mismatch between informal and formal judgments, we conducted two acceptability judgment experiments testing the acceptability of topicalization from various island domains in Norwegian. We were interested in determining whether we could (i) find evidence for island insensitivity and (ii) pin down the source of qualitatively different island effects. We asked whether such effects are best explained as reflecting violations of a uniform syntactic constraint or extrasyntactic factors. Our results suggest that embedded questions and relative clauses are not uniform syntactic islands for topicalization, but complex NPs are. Unexpectedly, we also found evidence suggesting that conditional adjunct clauses may not be islands.

This paper argues that Greek topicalization is an A’-movement dependency which is headed by a property-denoting phrase (i.e., of type ), dislocated to a left peripheral topic position (spec,TopicP). Crucially, at the syntax-semantics interface, the dislocated topic phrase must undergo total reconstruction, which means that topicalization is obligatorily mapped to a logical form which only comprises the copy of the topic phrase in the thematic position. Through the study of Greek topicalization I examine the syntax-semantics mapping for movement chains that involve property-phrases (type ), showing that such a movement chain could not be mapped onto an individual variable or a property-denoting trace. More generally, the present paper provides novel empirical evidence for the claim that property denoting traces do not exist in natural languages (Poole 2017; 2022). As a result, topicalization resorts to total reconstruction as the only logical form which can be directly interpreted by the semantic component.

In light of global climate change, identifying critical marine habitats and conserving them is essential. Marine conservation planning recommends designating cooler habitats as marine protected areas. The ‘deep‐reef refugia' hypothesis suggests that deeper, suitable habitats may allow species to undergo the evolutionary changes necessary to adapt to the growing environmental threats they face. This hypothesis has rarely been tested outside tropical ecosystems. This study, using a systematic approach, is the first to evaluate this hypothesis regarding fish communities in the east Mediterranean Sea (EMS), which is warming at an unprecedented rate. Fish were surveyed twice a year from 2015 to 2022 across three rocky habitats: shallow (10 m depth, 23% ± 11 of 1 m photosynthetically active radiation, PAR), upper mesophotic (25 m depth; 8% ± 4 of 1 m PAR), and lower mesophotic (45 m depth; 3% ± 2 of 1 m PAR), where summer maximal temperatures reach a mean of 29.69°C, 28.66°C, and 27.9°C, respectively. Data collected from 357 belt transects indicate that: 1) species composition and functional diversity of the shallow habitat are encompassed within those of the deeper habitats; 2) species diversity is greater in the upper mesophotic community compared to the shallow community; and 3) abundance is reduced at mesophotic depths. Unlike most findings on tropical coral ecosystems, our results suggest that a mixed fish community of indigenous and immigrant species is currently thriving at upper mesophotic depths. This habitat appears to act as a slightly cooler climate change refuge for a less diverse, shallower community, or a step along the way to tropicalization. The unique position of the EMS as a transitional marine environment emphasizes its potential role as an early indicator of changes in fish depth distributions that could globally impact subtropical ecosystems.

This squib is a contribution to the typology of ϕ-feature (mis-)matching in resumption, using data from the English-lexifier pidgin spoken in Cameroon. I demonstrate that Cameroon Pidgin English (CPE) has movement and base-generation resumptive pronouns (RPs). Unlike base-generation RPs, movement RPs show a number-gender mismatch with lexical object XP foci, and a number-gender-person mismatch with pronominals. I relate this to the recent literature and argue that, empirically, number-gender-person mismatches are attested within a single language and, theoretically, the CPE data are compatible with copy-deletion (Van Urk 2018; Scott 2021; Georgi & Amaechi 2023; Yip & Ahenkorah 2023) and impoverishment (Ershova 2024; Fongang 2025) approaches to movement RPs.

This paper presents a new phase-based theory of verb-second and indeed a new model of the left periphery. I argue that V-to-C movement of the verb to the phase head Fin0 has profound repercussions on clausal syntax which explains well-known differences between Modern Germanic V2 languages and Modern Romance non-V2 languages with respect to topicalisation. I also explore how the proposed analysis can account for the linear restriction on the prefield in V2 languages as well as the phenomenon of ‘residual verb second’ in otherwise non-V2 languages like Modern Romance.

In determiner sharing , a quantifier may be omitted from a coordination in the context of another ellipsis. This paper proposes a novel analysis on the basis of new German data: determiner sharing arises from the interaction of clausal ellipsis and split topicalization. I show that the apparent parasitism of determiner sharing can be derived without any further assumptions. The success of this analysis supports Move-and-Delete approaches to ellipsis.

Ngemba displays an interesting asymmetry in topicalization. Unlike subject topics, which are always resumed, object topics can only be resumed if the topic XP is animate. If it is inanimate, the presence of a resumptive pronoun is ungrammatical, unless the topic XP is a member of a conjunct (&P). In this paper, I argue that the absence of resumptive pronouns (RPs) with inanimate objects results from an Obliteration rule (Arregi & Nevins 2012) that deletes the OBJRP node when it has the features [ TOP , INAN ], among others. I propose that this rule is structurally constrained by sisterhood to V, such that it fails to apply to members of conjuncts because they are inside a &P. Overall, the Ngemba data call for a theory of resumption that goes beyond chain reduction (van Urk 2018; Scott 2021; Georgi & Amaechi 2023; Yip & Ahenkorah 2023). The analysis also strengthens the theoretical observation that impoverishment rules are (and need to be) featurally (Nevins 2011; Arregi & Nevins 2012; Keine & Müller 2020, among others) and structurally (Kallulli & Trommer 2011; Bobaljik 2012; Božič 2020; Fongang 2024) constrained.

The literature on locative inversion in English currently disputes whether locative inversion differs from PP topicalization in permitting a quantifier in the fronted PP to bind a pronoun in the subject. In order to resolve this dispute, this paper runs two experiments on Amazon Mechanical Turk, one an acceptability judgment task and the other a forced-choice task. Both find that PP topicalization does not differ from locative inversion: both permit variable binding. Locative inversion also does not differ from a minimally different sentence with the overt expletive there. These findings remove an argument against the null expletive analysis of English locative inversion, and they also show that weak crossover is not uniformly triggered by A-bar movement.

Finite adjunct clauses are often assumed to be among the strongest islands for filler–gap dependency creation cross-linguistically, but Kush, Lohndal & Sprouse (2019) found experimental evidence suggesting that finite conditional om-adjunct clauses are not islands for topicalization in Norwegian. To investigate the generality of these findings, we ran three acceptability judgment experiments testing topicalization out of three adjunct clause types: om ‘if’, når ‘when’ and fordi ‘because’ in Norwegian. Largely replicating Kush et al. (2019), we find evidence for the absence of strong island effects with topicalization from om-adjuncts in all three experiments. We find island effects for når- and fordi-adjuncts, but the size of the effects and the underlying judgment distributions that produce those effects differ greatly by island type. Our results suggest that the syntactic category ‘adjunct’ may not constitute a suitably fine-grained grouping to explain variation in island effects.