Italian Factive islands are not ‘that weak’: new evidence from the factive/bridge distinction.

Long-distance dependencies are a major property of human language, deriving from the successive application of movement operations across sentences. Nevertheless, this possibility seems to be restricted by the presence of barriers, which ‘trap’ constituents in more or less 'resistant' syntactic islands. Given this scenario, this paper paper investigates a specific type of island, namely factive complements, which are traditionally considered ‘weak’ islands. The main goal is thus to verify the status of factive islands in Italian, based on original experimental data. Moreover, since island effects have been generally tested against wh-extractions, a secondary goal of the present study is to verify whether other types of A’-movement, such as Focus fronting, can be restricted by island effects as well. The results obtained from two experimental tests, carried out with the collaboration of a total of 310 informants, provide evidence that Italian factive islands seem to lie somewhere between strong and weak islands, qualifying as a sort of ‘intermediate’ island. Indeed, direct objects appear to be less constrained than subjects, indirect objects and adjuncts. Furthermore, the extraction of a Focus constituent from a factive complement lowers the acceptability of the sentence, thus indicating that (factive) islands are indeed sensible to Focus fronting.