Experimental Syntax and Island Effects

Jon Sprouse is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Connecticut. Norbert Hornstein is a Full Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Maryland, College Park.

• 1. Experimental syntax and island effects: toward a comprehensive theory of islands Jon Sprouse and Norbert Hornstein; Part I. Global Issues in the Investigation of Island Effects: 2. Deriving competing predictions from grammatical approaches and reductionist approaches to island effects Jon Sprouse, Matthew W. Wagers and Colin Phillips; 3. Islands in the grammar? Standards of evidence Philip Hofmeister, Laura Staum Casasanto and Ivan A. Sag; 4. On the nature of island constraints. I: Language processing and reductionist accounts Colin Phillips; 5. Computational models of acquisition for islands Lisa Pearl and Jon Sprouse; 6. On the nature of island constraints. II: Language learning and innateness Colin Phillips; Part II. Specific Issues in the Investigation of Island Effects: 7. Memory mechanisms for wh-dependency formation and their implications for islandhood Matthew W. Wagers; 8. What's negative about negative islands? A re-evaluation of extraction from weak island contexts Robert Kluender and Simone Gieselman; 9. On the structural nature of island constraints Brian Dillon and Norbert Hornstein; 10. Backgrounded constituents cannot be 'extracted' Adele E. Goldberg; 11. Microvariation in islands Dave Kush, Akira Omaki and Norbert Hornstein; 12. Subject islands in German revisited Johannes Jurka; 13. Subject islands are different Maria Polinsky, Carlos G. Gallo, Peter Graff, Ekaterina Kravtchenko, Adam Milton Morgan and Anne Sturgeon; 14. What vs. who and which: kind-denoting fillers and the complexity of whether-islands Theodora Alexopoulou and Frank Keller; 15. Resumption in English Maria Polinsky, Lauren Eby Clemens, Adam Milton Morgan, Ming Xiang and Dustin Heestand; 16. The island (in)sensitivity of sluicing and sprouting Masaya Yoshida, Jiyeon Lee and Michael Walsh Dickey.

'This important collection of papers demonstrates the utility of experimental syntax by elucidating the debate about the nature and source of syntactic island effects concerning the interaction of the grammar and the processor, thereby providing an excellent introduction to a new avenue for syntactic research.' Robert Freidin, Princeton University, New Jersey