Structural, Functional, and Processing Perspectives on Linguistic Island Effects

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...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Annual review of linguistics 2022-01, Vol.8 (1), p.495-525
Main Authors: Liu, Yingtong, Winckel, Elodie, Abeillé, Anne, Hemforth, Barbara, Gibson, Edward
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Cognitive science
discourse constraints
filler-gap dependencies
Focus-Background Conflict
linguistic encoding
linguistic interference
Linguistics
long-distance dependencies
syntactic constructions
syntactic islands
usage-based grammar
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Summary: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.
ISSN:2333-9683
2333-9691
DOI:10.1146/annurev-linguistics-011619-030319