Structural, Functional, and Processing Perspectives on Linguistic Island Effects

Yingtong Liu

doi:10.1146/annurev-linguistics-011619-030319

Structural, Functional, and Processing Perspectives on Linguistic Island Effects

2022-01-14

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DOI：10.1146/annurev-linguistics-011619-030319

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Ross (1967) observed that island structures like Who do you think [NP the gift from _] prompted the rumor? or Who did you hear [NP the statement [s that the CEO promoted _]]? are not acceptable, despite having what seem to be plausible meanings in some contexts. Ross (1967) and Chomsky (1973) hypothesized that the source of the unacceptability is in the syntax. Here, we summarize how theories of discourse, frequency, and memory from the literature might account for such effects. We suggest that there is only one island structure-a class of coordination islands-that is best explained by a syntactic/semantic constraint. We speculate that all other island structures are likely to be explained in terms of discourse, frequency, and memory.

Keywords:

syntactic islands

long-distance dependencies

filler-gap dependencies

discourse constraints

usage-based grammar

syntactic constructions

Focus-Background Conflict

linguistic interference

linguistic encoding

Structural, Functional, and Processing Perspectives on Linguistic Island Effects

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