An acceptability study of long-distance extractions in Swedish

The current study compares controlled acceptability judgments for Swedish relative clause extractions to extractions from that-clauses and extractions from non-restrictive relative clauses. It also compares each structure in both extracted and non-extracted form. The reported possibility of relative clause extraction in Swedish (and the other Mainland Scandinavian languages) has long presented a challenge to universal theories of constraints on extraction because the phenomenon is cross- linguistically very rare. In the off-line judgment data presented here, relative clause extractions are shown to pattern with extractions that are assumed to involve an island-like violation (non-restrictive relative clause extraction), thus contrasting with informal judgments reported in the literature. The data also appear to present a counterpoint to the conclusion reached in Tutunjian, Heinat, Klingvall and Wiklund (2017) from on-line eye-tracking measures, regarding the representational status of this structure as being more in line with that of a licit extraction. Potential explanations for the obtained patterns of the result are discussed, presenting avenues for further investigations.