Island Constraints

by Goodluck, Helen; Rochemont, Michael

• ISBN13: 9780792316893
• ISBN10: 0792316894
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1992-11-01
• Publisher: Kluwer Academic Pub

Summary

This book contains articles on the theory, acquisition and processing of island constraints. The book is unique in taking an interdisciplinary approach to a syntactic phenomenon that has been at the center of linguistic debates since the 1960s. Both transformational and non-transformational approaches to island constraints are represented. The papers in the volume show how data from empirical studies of the role of island constraints in processing and acquisition by normals and by special populations can contribute to our understanding of broad issues concerning the representation of linguistic structures in the mind, including the interplay between lexical, pragmatic and syntactic knowledge. In addition, they contribute vital data to specific on-going debates in processing and development, such as the emergence of movement rules in children's grammars and the temporal ordering of events in the analysis of discontinuous dependencies by the language processor. The papers in the volume exploit examples from a variety of languages and use a variety of experimental techniques to marshal arguments for specific models of the theory of island constraints and their deployment in real-time language acquisition and language processing.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Island Constraints: an Introduction	p. 1
No Variable Is an Island: Computational Complexity and Island Constraints	p. 35
Parsing Complex NPs in French	p. 61
Resumptive Pronouns in Islands	p. 89
Islands, Learnability and the Lexicon	p. 109
Adjunct Islands and Acquisition	p. 181
Argument Extraction out of Indirect Questions in French	p. 195
Deriving Island Constraints from Principles of Predication	p. 223
Sentences as Islands: on the Boundedness of A'-Movement in American Sign Language	p. 259
Which Children Did They Show Obey Strong Crossover?	p. 275
Processing Subject Extractions	p. 295
Parsing with Grammar: Islands, Heads, and Garden Paths	p. 321
Island Constraints at Eighty	p. 351
Bounding Rightward A-dependencies	p. 373
Sensitivity to Islands in an Aphasic Individual	p. 399
The Processing Implementation of Syntactic Constraints: the Sentence Matching Debate	p. 419
Subjacency Violations and Empty Categories in Second Language Acquisition	p. 445
List of Contributors	p. 465
Name Index	p. 469
Subject Index	p. 475
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