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It is standardly assumed that relative clauses are islands for extraction in English, and that constraints on extraction from syntactic islands are universal. However, it has been shown that the Mainland Scandinavian languages provide a large variety of counterexamples. This study investigates the island status of English relative clauses in the light of these counterexamples. 190 native speakers provided acceptability judgments on a 5-point Likert scale of 48 target sentences. The results show that, unlike in Danish, acceptability of extraction is not correlated with frequency of occurrence of the matrix verb or with exposure over time. Furthermore, there is no difference in acceptability between moving a topic or a wh-element out of a relative clause. We argue that this supports the traditional analysis of English relative clauses as strong islands, and that the results are compatible with a parametric account of language variation.
