Islands and Linearization

自然语言的一个普遍特征是语言学家称之为“运动”的属性。当一个短语在句子的一个位置发音被解释为在句子的另一个位置发音时，运动就产生了。为了说明这一点，考虑一下“玛丽雇佣了谁？”在这种情况下，句子开头的“who”被理解为动词的直接宾语，如“Mary hired who?”引人注目的是，在某些情况下，人们可以将“who”从与之相关的位置“移动”很远，但在其他情况下则不然。“你说玛丽说我喜欢谁？”，而不是“你遇到过喜欢谁的男人？”前者很复杂，但可以接受，而后者则完全不可接受。这是约翰·罗斯在他20世纪60年代开创性的作品中所说的“岛屿”被禁止运动的一个例子。（关系从句是罗斯的一个岛。）本项目的目标是找出这种孤岛现象的因果根源。该项目的潜在影响超出了其关注的语法问题。首先，岛屿是一个“难以找到”证据的经典案例，因此在关于语言（例如先天）和学习（以及对儿童来说，需要获得什么）许多方面的必要步骤的更广泛辩论中发挥着特殊作用。其次，该项目不仅涉及运动和岛屿，还涉及与它们相互作用的各种语言过程。这将对那些从心理语言学和句法角度研究这些问题的人感兴趣。第三，公共关系研究项目将探索岛屿的正式和功能理论，着眼于这些经常相互竞争的观点的潜在综合。

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.