UFR de Linguistique

Caterina Donati

cdonati@linguist.univ-paris-diderot.fr

Islands

The aim of this class is to reflect on the nature, the boundaries and the explanations of island constraints. It will have both a theoretical and an empirical/experimental stance, including 1) a survey of the theoretical proposals that have been made and their problems ; 2) an exploration of radically alternative proposals advocating processing difficulties or pragmatic oddities as the only factors explaining islands ; 3) the setting of some experimental guidelines on how to tease apart these factors.

Students taking the seminar will have a) to discuss a paper b) to present about an experiment to be: to pick up an island, an analysis and a language, and set up an experiment aiming at testing the predictions of that analysis. For that island effects on that language

The main text : Cedric Boeckx . 2012. Syntactic Islands, CUP.

References

• Beck 2006. Intervention effects follow from focus interpretation. Natural Language Semantics. 14 : 1-56
• Boeckx, C. and A. Gallego. 2011. Deriving CED effects from phases: some reasons for skepticism. Ms., ICREA/UAB.
• Cinque, G. 1978. Towards a unified treatment of island constraints. In Proceedings of the 12th International Congress of Linguistics, Insbrucker Beitragezur Sprachwissenschaft, W. Dressler and W. Meid (eds.), 344–348.
• Epstein, S. D., H. Kitahara, and T. D. Seely. 2010. Structure building that can’t be. Ms., University of Michigan, Keio University, and Michigan StateUniversity.
• Hofmeister and Sag 2010. Cognitive constraints and island effects. Language 86 :366-415.
• Hornstein, N., H. Lasnik, and J. Uriagereka. 2007. The dynamics of islands: speculations on the locality of movement. Linguistic Analysis 33: 149–175.
• Hornstein, N. and J. Nunes. 2008. Some thoughts on adjunction. Biolinguistics2: 57–86.
• Hornstein, N., J. Nunes, and K. K. Grohmann. 2006. Understanding Minimalism. Cambridge University Press.
• Huang, C.-T. J. 1982. Logical relations in Chinese and the theory of grammar. Doctoraldissertation, MIT.
• Müller, G. 2010. On deriving CED effects from the PIC. Linguistic Inquiry 41: 35–82.
• Nunes, J. and J. Uriagereka. 2000. Cyclicity and extraction domains. Syntax 3: 20–43.
• Phillips, C. 2006. The real-time status of island constraints. Language 82: 795–823.
• Phillips, C. 2009. Should we impeach armchair linguists? In S. Iwasaki, ed., Japanese-Korean Linguistics 17. Stanford: CSLI.
• Phillips, C. 2011. Some arguments and non-arguments for reductionist accounts of syntactic phenomena. Language and Cognitive Processes 26: 1–32.
• Rizzi, L. and U. Shlonsky. 2007. Strategies of subject extraction. In Interfaces + Recursion = Language? Chomsky’s Minimalism and the View from Syntax-semantics, ed. U.
• Sauerland and M. Gaertner, 115–160. Mouton: de Gruyter
• Sprouse, J. 2009. Revisiting satiation. Linguistic Inquiry 40(2): 329–341.
• Sprouse, J., M. Wagers, and C. Phillips. To appear. A test of the relation between working memory capacity and syntactic island effects. Language.
• Stepanov, A. 2007. The end of CED? Minimalism and extraction domain. Syntax 10: 80–126.
• Szabolcsi A. 2006. Strong and Weak islands. In M. Everaert and H. van Riemsdjk, The Blackwell Companion to Syntax, vol1, CH. 64.
• Takahashi, D. 1994. Minimality of movement. Doctoral dissertation, University of Connecticut.