Islands and Linearization

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A ubiquitous feature of natural languages is a property linguists call ''movement.'' Movement obtains when a phrase pronounced in one position in a sentence is interpreted as if it were in some other position in that sentence. To illustrate, consider 'Who did Mary hire?' in which 'who' in sentence initial position is understood as direct object of the verb, as in 'Mary hired who?'. Strikingly, one can ''move'' 'who' a long way from the position it is associated with in some circumstances but not in others: e.g. 'Who did you say that Mary said that I liked?' versus 'Who did you meet a man who liked?' The former is complicated yet acceptable, while the second is strongly unacceptable. This is an instance of movement being prohibited from what John Ross called ''islands'' in his groundbreaking work of the 1960's. (A relative clause is one of Ross's islands.) The goal of the present project is to isolate the causal roots of such island phenomena.The project has potential impact beyond the syntactic issues that are its focus. For one, islands are a classic case of ''hard-to-find'' evidence, and therefore play a special role in the broader debates about language (e.g. on innateness) and the steps necessary to study (and, for children, what is required to acquire) its many facets. Second, the project deals not only with movement and islands but also with a variety of linguistic processes interacting with them. This will be of interest to those working on these issues from a psycholinguistic as well as a syntactic perspective. Third, the pr research project will explore both formal and functional accounts theories of islands, with an eye towards a potential synthesis of these often competing perspectives.