A minimalist analysis of syntactic islands

An account of island effects within the Minimalist Program presents a challenge, since assuming the Minimal Link Condition (MLC) as the only locality constraint on movement, as is done in the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995: Chapter 4 and subsquent work), fails to account for fundamental properties of movement. Firstly, it does not offer an explanation for asymmetries in wh-extraction from wh-islands which were traditionally explained by the ECP and the locality concept of Subjacency, the latter being parameterized in the way it applies in the languages of the world. Additionally, given the MLC, an explanation for the other types of island phenomena, the so-called CED effects (Condition on Extraction Domains) (Huang 1982), is lost. In this article, I will argue that an account of island effects can be given that is compatible with the MLC. It will be shown that cross-linguistic variation with respect to wh-island phenomena can be explained if we assume that C 0 may project multiple specifiers, and that the cross-linguistic variation with respect to CED-island effects is a consequence of the structure-building operation Merge in combination with θ-theoretic restrictions

Algorithm · Linguistics · Locality · Minimalist program · Natural language processing · Parameterized complexity · Syntax · Theoretical linguistics · Computer Science · Language and cultural evolution · Mathematics · Natural Language Processing Techniques · Philosophy · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation

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