Islands: A Mixed Analysis �

Abstract

Ever since Ross (1967), one of the topics that has dominated the literature on wh (long-distance dependency) constructions is that of “islands, ” regions of sentences which are opaque to wh dependencies. (1) a. *This book, I know a student who read. [Complex NP Constraint] b. *What did you eat bagels and? [Coordinate Structure Constraint] c. *It was the Mets that I traveled to New York before I watched. [Adjunct Condition] d. *Star Trek, to watch is important. [Sentential Subject Condition] While Ross simply listed types of structures which display this opacity, subsequent literature has attempted to discover unifying principles to explain islandhood. Despite these efforts, none has been entirely successful. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the source of island constraints, and to propose an LFG account of islands which differs somewhat from the standard account in Kaplan and Zaenen (1989). The literature on islands can be basically split into two groups: those that provide a syntactic explanation and those that provide a pragmatic explanation. Fo