The aim of this class is to reflect on the nature, the boundaries and the explanations
of island constraints. It will have both a theoretical and an empirical/experimental
stance, including 1) a survey of the theoretical proposals that have been made and their
problems ; 2) an exploration of radically alternative proposals advocating processing
difficulties or pragmatic oddities as the only factors explaining islands ; 3) the setting of
some experimental guidelines on how to tease apart these factors.
Students taking the seminar will have
a) to discuss a paper
b) to present about an experiment to be: to pick up an island, an analysis and a language,
and set up an experiment aiming at testing the predictions of that analysis for that
island effects on that language.
The main text :
Cedric Boeckx . 2012. Syntactic Islands, CUP.
Beck 2006. Intervention effects follow from focus interpretation. Natural Language Semantics. 14 : 1-56
Boeckx, C. and A. Gallego. 2011. Deriving CED effects from phases: some reasons for skepticism. Ms., ICREA/UAB.
Cinque, G. 1978. Towards a unified treatment of island constraints. In Proceedings of the 12th International Congress of Linguistics, Insbrucker Beitragezur Sprachwissenschaft, W. Dressler and W. Meid (eds.), 344–348.
Epstein, S. D., H. Kitahara, and T. D. Seely. 2010. Structure building that can’t be. Ms., University of Michigan, Keio University, and Michigan StateUniversity.
Hofmeister and Sag 2010. Cognitive constraints and island effects. Language 86 :366-415.
Hornstein, N., H. Lasnik, and J. Uriagereka. 2007. The dynamics of islands: speculations on the locality of movement. Linguistic Analysis 33: 149–175.
Hornstein, N. and J. Nunes. 2008. Some thoughts on adjunction. Biolinguistics2: 57–86.
Hornstein, N., J. Nunes, and K. K. Grohmann. 2006. Understanding Minimalism. Cambridge University Press.
Huang, C.-T. J. 1982. Logical relations in Chinese and the theory of grammar. Doctoraldissertation, MIT.
Müller, G. 2010. On deriving CED effects from the PIC. Linguistic Inquiry 41: 35–82.
Nunes, J. and J. Uriagereka. 2000. Cyclicity and extraction domains. Syntax 3: 20–43.
Phillips, C. 2006. The real-time status of island constraints. Language 82: 795–823.
Phillips, C. 2009. Should we impeach armchair linguists? In S. Iwasaki, ed., Japanese-Korean Linguistics 17. Stanford: CSLI.
Phillips, C. 2011. Some arguments and non-arguments for reductionist accounts of syntactic phenomena. Language and Cognitive Processes 26: 1–32.
Rizzi, L. and U. Shlonsky. 2007. Strategies of subject extraction. In Interfaces + Recursion = Language? Chomsky’s Minimalism and the View from Syntax-semantics, ed. U.
Sauerland and M. Gaertner, 115–160. Mouton: de Gruyter
Sprouse, J. 2009. Revisiting satiation. Linguistic Inquiry 40(2): 329–341.
Sprouse, J., M. Wagers, and C. Phillips. To appear. A test of the relation between working memory capacity and syntactic island effects. Language.
Stepanov, A. 2007. The end of CED? Minimalism and extraction domain. Syntax 10: 80–126.
Szabolcsi A. 2006. Strong and Weak islands. In M. Everaert and H. van Riemsdjk, The Blackwell Companion to Syntax, vol1, CH. 64.
Takahashi, D. 1994. Minimality of movement. Doctoral dissertation, University of Connecticut.