Islands: A Mixed Analysis

Yehuda N. Falk

Abstract

Proceedings of LFG09; CSLI Publications On-line

Analyses of island constraints have categorized them either as pragmatically driven or syntactically driven. It is argued here that most islands have both an extrasyntactic (pragmatics, processing) component and a syntactic component. On the formal side, it is proposed that islands are the result of an off-path constraint referring to a WHPATH feature, rather than the specification of grammatical functions permitted on the path.