Boeckx (2008) - Islands PDF

Language and Linguistics Compass 2/1 (2008): 151167, 10.1111/j.1749-818x.2007.00043.
Islands
Cedric Boeckx*
Harvard University
Abstract
The present article presents an overview of how islands have been treated from
Chomskys and Rosss seminal works to current minimalist theorizing.
1. Discovery
If asked what the most fundamental empirical discovery made so far by
generative grammarians is, I would unhesitatingly answer islands. In the
1960s, grammarians discovered configurations that render otherwise legitimate
syntactic dependencies illicit. These include domains like complex
noun phrases, adjoined clauses, coordinate structures, left branches,
sentential subjects, and embedded interrogative clauses. With characteris-
tic flair, John R. Ross (1967) dubbed such configurations islands (the
image being that of syntactic elements marooned on certain portions of
the sentence).
Chomsky was the first to observe in 1964 a condition on the application
of syntactic transformation that prohibited movement of an element of
type A to a position B if that element was dominated by another element
of type A. This condition, which, again thanks to Rosss talent as a
wordsmith, came to be known as the A-over-A principle, and which I
schematize (in a more modern idiom) in (1), straightforwardly accounts for
contrasts like (2ab).
(1) *[A W]i . . . [ . . . [A Z [A ti]]]

(2) a. [PP From [PP under which bed]]i did John retrieve the book ti?
b. *[ PP Under which bed]i did John retrieve the book [PP from [PP ti]]?
In those days, transformations were formulated in terms of a structural
analysis and a structural change, and were of the form If you find the
following string, Cx WYZ X, turn it into XCx WYZ. W, Y, and Z
were called variables, which provided the context around which the relevant
transformation, joining, say, Cx and X, operated. What Chomsky discovered
in 1964 was the need to impose constraints on variables in syntax. As the
title of his thesis makes clear, this is exactly what Ross set out to do.
2007 The Author
Journal Compilation 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
152 Cedric Boeckx
Few would deny that we owe our modern interest in islands to Rosss
(1967) seminal work. Ross went far beyond Chomskys limited examples
motivating the A-over-A condition, and provided us with a detailed
overview of the major syntactic islands.
Ross systematically investigated the fact that seemingly minute manipu-
lations of the context of a transformation dramatically affected the
acceptability of sentences, as in (3a,b).
(3) a. Handsome though I believe that Dick is, Im still going

to marry Herman.
b. *Handsome though I believe the claim that Dick is,
Im still going to marry Herman.
It is perhaps unfair to characterize Rosss brilliant work as just a list of
islands, for the thesis is peppered with insights that have played an important
role in subsequent theorizing about islands, but it is fair to say that the
beginning of our understanding of islands, of what they have in common,
and why they may exist, goes back to Chomskys (1973) epoch-making
paper on Conditions on transformations.
Chomsky (1973) set out to investigate what several of the domains Ross had
identified as islands have in common. Thus began the modern study of
locality, which, in many ways, defined the nature of current linguistic
theorizing.1
Chomskys central insight in 1973 is that movement is subject to the
subjacency condition, a condition that forbids movement from crossing in
one step too many nodes of the same kind [more specifically, subjacency bans
movement from crossing two bounding nodes, where the bounding nodes
were the top clausal node (S; our modern IP) and NP (our modern DP)]. The
condition correctly captured the unacceptability of (3b), as can be seen in (4).
(4) *[Handsomei though [S I believe [NP the claim that [S Dick is ti]]],
Im still going to marry Herman.
Since Chomsky (1973), most conditions introduced and discussed by
generative linguists can be characterized as locality principles, that is,
principles that limit the space within which linguistic rules can apply.
Remarkably, linguists today focus on many of the conditions and the
phenomena they give rise to that Chomsky first mentioned in his 1973
study. I have in mind here notions like bounding nodes, analyzed as barriers
in Government-Binding theory (Chomsky 1986), or as phases in minimalism
(Chomsky forthcoming);2 strict cyclicity (now referred to as the No Tam-
pering condition; Chomsky 2000),3 successive cyclicity (whose form and
rationale have remained remarkably unchanged since its introduction),4 and
superiority (now treated as a subcase of relativized minimality; Rizzi 1990;
Chomsky 1995; Kitahara 1997). All of these can be traced back to Chomskys
original discussion.
2007 The Author Language and Linguistics Compass 2/1 (2008): 151167, 10.1111/j.1749-818x.2007.00043.x
Islands 153
Indeed, much work after Conditions on Transformations solidified

Chomskys claims. Today, the empirical basis for successive cyclicity,
superiority, along with Rosss islands, is truly remarkable. A substantial
portion of this success was the direct result of research on languages
displaying distinct ranges of syntactic dependencies, such as wh-in-situ
languages (see Huang 1982; Lasnik and Saito 1984) or multiple wh-fronting
languages (Rudin 1988; Boskovic 1998; Richards 2001). I do not intend
to review this line of research here, as such a review would require a
book-length treatment to do justice to all the subtleties uncovered since
1973.5 My ambition here is more modest: I will concentrate on work that
has tried to deepen the understanding achieved in Conditions on Trans-
formations; that is, work that has tried to ask why islands should exist.
In focusing on this type of work, I do not mean to imply that the
research that led to the solidification of the conditions on transformations
proposed by Chomsky did not try to explain why these conditions should
hold. Empirical solidification and explanatory depth often operate in tandem,
and research on islands is no exception. My reason for focusing on the
why-question (as opposed to the what-question) is two-fold: first, the issue
of why islands obtain, and, more specifically, why these islands obtain, is
of direct relevance to current theorizing in generative grammar, especially
from the vantage point of minimalism, which seeks to determine why the
architecture of the language faculty is the way it is; second, the various
possibilities entertained in this domain fall within relatively well-defined
categories, which makes a review like the present one more manageable.
I should point out that what follows is, obviously, a very personal overview.
The material selected here strikes me as particularly relevant to issues
pertaining to islands, but I have no doubt that others would prefer a different
mode of presentation.
2. Why Should Islands Exist?

It is very natural to ask why transformations should be constrained in the
way they are. The question of the naturalness of islands is in fact already
raised in Chomsky (1964: 40, 45), and is discussed briefly in Chomsky
(1973: Section 11). There Chomsky notes that some of the conditions he
discusses such as the A-over-A and the Specified Subject Condition have the
effect of reducing ambiguity, or of increasing the reliability of a reasonable
perceptual strategy that seeks the nearest appropriate element, or of
guaranteeing a correspondence between deep structure position and scope.
Today, one can identify three broad avenues of research into the
question of why islands exist. The first, by far the most popular, is firmly
rooted in Chomskys (1973) Subjacency account, and takes islands to
reflect computational limitations. Specifically, it emphasizes the idea that
well-behaved, efficient computations should apply within limited domains;
islands characterize these domains. Transgressing such computational limits
154 Cedric Boeckx
leads to island violations. Put differently, this conception sees islands as the
by-products of principles that guarantee the computational efficiency
of grammatical operations. Chomsky has consistently favored this view,
from the Subjacency account (see Chomsky 1973, 1977) through the
Barriers framework (Chomsky 1986), and, more recently, the phase
framework (Chomsky 2000, 2001, forthcoming).
The second conception of the etiology of islands is based on the idea
that islands identify conditions on the output(s) of the computational
system. Whereas the first approach views islands as reflecting limitations
on syntactic processes (rule application), the second views islands as
affecting the products of these computations. Under this view, islands
must naturally follow by taking those conditions to be imposed by the
systems with which the syntactic component interfaces.6 That is, they
restrict the form in which syntactic information is being handed to
them. Under this view, islands amount to representational constraints.
[Path-based approaches to locality in the GB era, such as Kayne 1984
and Pesetsky 1982 were of this type, as was Kosters (1978, 1987) approach
although the issue of interfaces only became prominent with the advent
of minimalism.]
Viewed in this light, one can call the first view the derivational view,
and the second, the representational view (a similar division is endorsed
in Hornstein et al. 2007). Both views make islands conditions of the faculty
of language in the narrow sense (FLN, to borrow a term from Hauser
et al. 2002); that is, islands are conditions imposed on the workings on the
syntactic component (narrow syntax, as it is now often referred to), or
on how the mapping from syntax onto the external systems. To put it in
yet another way, islands are conditions of narrow syntax, or interface
conditions.
The third view locates islands outside of FLN, and ascribes them to the
faculty of language in the broad sense (FLB). Specifically, the third view
treats islands to be the result of processing/memory factors that constrain
how linguistic knowledge is put to use. Thus, the third view takes islands
to be a matter of performance, not competence (for representative works
in this tradition, see Pritchett 1991; Kluender 1991, 1992, 1998, 2004;
see already Givon 1979).7,8
It is conceivable, indeed, quite possible, that each of the three views
just outlined captures a portion of the truth, but in practice linguists have
attempted to unify all island effects under a single umbrella.9 All three
views have now distinguished pedigrees, and I suspect that conceptual
arguments could be pressed into service to support any of the three
candidate theories of islands.
As is so often the case, theoretical debates will have to be resolved
in large part on the basis of detailed empirical investigation.10 So let me
now turn to the kind of data that may bear on the issue of why islands
exist.
Islands 155
3. Island Circumvention
Let me note two things right away. First, the strategy to be used here will
not be different from what is done in, say, biology. When trying to figure
out the nature of, say, molecular processes, special attention will be given
to situations where something goes wrong, where an expected result fails
to obtain. (This is why mutants and monsters have played such a prominent
role in biology. Think of the role of the fruit flies that grow eyes on their
antennas in the context of evolutionary developmental biology.) In the
context of islands, this will amount to finding cases where expected island
effects fail to obtain.
Second, in the domain of finding the data that bear on the nature of
islands, Rosss impact cannot be overestimated. In addition to establishing
the existence of islands, Ross documented at least three classes of cases
that bear directly on the nature of islands. I will refer to such classes of
cases as instances of island circumvention. A more popular term to refer
to at least some of these cases is island repair. But I want to avoid using
the term repair, because it is suggestive of a certain view of island (one
that takes islands to be violable conditions). I find the term circumvention
more neutral.
The first class of island circumvention identified by Ross falls under
the rubric of resumption. As is well-known, the presence of a resumptive
pronoun where we expect a gap leads to an improvement in island contexts.
Contrast (5) and (6).
(5) *Which woman did John laugh [after Bill kissed __]
(6) Which woman did John laugh [after Bill kissed her]
The second class of island circumvention, again discussed by Ross in
his thesis, goes by the name of pied-piping. Ross noted that taking the
island along with the moving element renders movement possible.
(7) *Whose did you buy [__ book]

(8) [Whose book] did you buy
The third class of island circumvention was discussed by Ross, not
in his thesis, but in a justly famous 1969 paper where he introduced the
phenomenon of sluicing. Ross noted that including the island as part of
the ellipsis sites leads to acceptability.
(9) *Who did John made [the claim that Peter saw __]
(10) John made the claim that Peter saw someone, but I cant remember
who [elided: <John made the claim that Peter saw __>]
Perhaps the least surprising instance of island circumvention is pied-
piping, as, by taking the island along with the moving element, no
156 Cedric Boeckx
dependency is established across the island. In contrast, depending on how

one analyzes resumption and ellipsis, islands will be seen as impenetrable
domains, or as domains out of which extraction can take place, provided
a subsequent operation (resumption/ellipsis) hides this fact. Suppose we
can establish that movement took place out of the ellipsis site in (10), then
it follows that islands cannot be seen as domains that block movement
processes. That is, the view that treats islands as conditions on efficient
computation cannot be maintained in its simplest form. In contrast, the
view that treats islands as interface conditions, or as processing limitations
can accommodate facts like (10) more straightforwardly.
The explanatory potential of island circumvention data was very clear
to Ross, who used them to argue that it is not the case that islands
block all movement dependencies. Rather, islands constrain only those
dependencies that leave a gap. If no gap is left [either because the gap is
pronounced (resumption), or because it is contained in a domain that does not
get pronounced (ellipsis)], the relevant dependency will be judged legitimate.
Recent work on resumption (Boeckx 2003) and ellipsis (Lasnik 2001,
2005; Merchant 2001) have used the same logic to investigate the nature
of islands from a minimalist perspective. Boeckx remains very close to Rosss
original view, and takes resumption to indicate that islands block only certain
kinds of operations (as such, the analysis does not allow one to distinguish
between the three views on the nature of islands). Lasnik and Merchant
take the ellipsis data to argue in favor of the view that treats (some) islands as
illegitimate objects at the interface between syntax and Phonetic Form (PF).
Needless to say, such arguments crucially rely on how ellipsis and
resumption are treated in general (i.e., outside of island domains). All I
wanted to point out here is that island circumvention data can provide a
rich source of insights into the nature of islandhood.
There is a fourth kind of island circumvention, which Ross did not
identify. Cross-linguistic research (spearheaded by Huang 1982 and Lasnik
and Saito 1984) revealed that leaving a wh-phrase in situ (an option
made available in some languages such as Chinese) does not give rise to island
effects, despite the fact that some kind of dependency crossing the island
appears to be necessary to capture the relevant scope of the wh-phrase.
Perhaps here, too, Rosss intuition that islands constrain only some
types of dependency, but not all, may prove correct (see Tsai 1994 and
Reinhart 1995).
(11) Ni xiangxin Lisi mai-le sheme de shuofa

You believe Lisa bought what DE claim
You believe the claim that Lisa bought what?
The wh-in-situ data prove even more interesting, once we take into account
the fact, first noted by Huang (1982), that some wh-in-situ (adjunct
wh-phrases equivalent to why, for example) give rise to island effects.
Islands 157
(12) *Ni xiangxin Lisi weisheme lai de shuofa

You believe Lisa why came DE claim
You believe the claim that Lisa came why?
As Lasnik (1999) correctly pointed out, the existence of island effects with
wh-in-situ appears very problematic for the processing view on islandhood.
The guiding intuition shared by all processing accounts of islands I know
of is that islands make it difficult to associate the filler (wh-phrase) and the
gap (e.g., the distance between the filler and the gap is too long, or, too
much has to be kept in working memory before the gap is encountered).
It is hard to see how such accounts would handle the wh-in-situ facts, as
there is no gap to be filled in such sentences [Goldberg (2006) claims that
the island-effects induced by wh-in-situ are not stable across speakers,
but this does not strike me as very promising, judging from the extensive
literature on this topic, most of which reporting on research done by
native speakers; see Watanabe 2001 and Simpson 2000 for reviews].
The wh-in-situ paradigm, in particular the contrast between adjunct
and argument wh-phrases in (11)(12), leads me to touch on another central
issue pertaining to how islandhood is to be understood.
4. Asymmetries Among Islands

The adjunct/argument asymmetry is not confined to the domain of
wh-in-situ. It has been documented in many languages with overt
wh-fronting, and it led to a famous distinction between two kinds of
islands: weak or selective islands (WI) and strong or absolute islands (SI).
WIs (wh-island, factive island, negative island, etc.) are domains that
prohibit extraction of certain types of elements (adjuncts), but not others
(arguments). SIs do not distinguish between arguments and adjuncts, and
block fronting of both types of elements.
Typically, the selectiveness of WIs is characterizable in terms of Rizzis
(1990) relativized minimality.11 In a situation like (13), acts as an intervener
(i.e., creates an island), blocking any relation between and , unless
and (,) are of distinct types.
(13) > > (> indicates c-command)

Obviously, the task of the theorist is to find the adequate types of ele-
ments functioning in syntax and entering into (13). At present, it seems quite
clear that this will necessitate an organization of features in terms of class,
subclass (dimensions), and possibly values, a feature hierarchy/geometry not
unlike that developed in phonological theory (for relevant discussion, see Rizzi
2001, 2004; Starke 2001; Boeckx and Jeong 2004; and references therein).
Details aside, the type of solution offered by relativized minimality to
the phenomenon of WIs is very elegant, and makes a lot of sense from a
minimalist perspective.
158 Cedric Boeckx
SIs have so far received a less satisfactory treatment. Most approaches

adopt and seek to refine Huangs (1982) fundamental insight (see also
Cattell 1976) that any extraction out of non-governed domains is barred,
where non-governed domains are adjuncts and subjects (/specifiers), that is,
non-complements. Distinguishing non-complements from complements
while at the same time unifying subjects (/specifiers) and adjuncts has proven
extremely difficult, especially in the context of the minimalist program
where the putatively unifying notion of government is not a primitive.
In addition to the issue of government, work on minimalism found it
hard to rely on the very logic of GB approaches to islands, whose starting
point was the need for traces (empty categories) to be appropriately
licensed. Once traces were replaced by copies, as in Chomsky (1993), the
conceptual motivation to license copies was far less obvious. [Whereas it
was perfectly plausible to impose conditions that were specific to traces
(distinct from their antecedents), it is much harder to do that same for
copies.] It may be for this reason that minimalist studies have tended to
favor derivational conditions on movement, as opposed to representational
conditions (the latter being more natural in GB models, as traces were
formed after movement).
Be that as it may, the type of solution that various minimalist researchers
have provided, however, is uniform: domains out of which extraction is
barred emerge derivationally, from the computational dynamics and resources
of narrow syntax (see Uriagereka 1999a,b, 2003; Ochi 1999; Stepanov
2001; Nunes 2004; Nunes and Uriagereka 2000; Chomsky 2000, 2001,
forthcoming; Gallego 2007; Fortuny 2007; Nissenbaum 2000). Uriagerekas
(1999a) insight has proven particularly influential (a version of it is part of
Chomskys phase-based account). Uriagerekas intuition is this: complex
left branches (specifiers) and complex adjuncts complicate otherwise very
appealing linearization procedures, such as Kayne 1994. Allowing such
complex specifiers and adjuncts to be linearized early, independent of
the main projection line of the tree, would simplify the linearization. Call
this approach the distributed linearization, or, as it more widely known,
the multiple spell-out approach (the term spell-out is used to mean transfer
to the interfaces). Under this view, the domains that constitute SIs emerge
as domains that have already been linearized when extraction out of them
is attempted. (For a discussion of how this view handles some of the island
circumvention facts, see Hornstein et al. 2007.)
A different way of unifying SIs, pursued in Boeckx (2003) (see also
Rackowski and Richards 2005; Gallego 2007; Gallego and Uriagereka
2007; Henderson 2006; for a somewhat different take on the relevance of
agreement in the domain of extraction, see Mayr 2006), is to treat them
as domains that are opaque to agreement processes, either inherently
(adjunct) or else as a result of movement (specifiers of the subject type).
As agreement is taken to underlie most instances of movement in some
models of grammar (see Chomsky 2000), domains that are impervious to
Islands 159
agreement will be impervious to those instances of movement that require

agreement. Boeckxs analysis is designed in large part to handle island-
circumvention effects under resumption. The basic intuition of this approach
is to take resumption to free movement from agreement.12
As discussed in Boeckx (2003), many cases can be found where the
resumptive pronoun and the wh-phrase antecedent were not in an agreement
relation. The examples in (14)(17) illustrate the lack of agreement (i.e.,
lack of phi-feature identity) once finds in the context of resumption.
(Data taken from McCloskey 2002, for Irish, and Adger and Ramchand
2005, for Scottish Gaelic.)
Anti-Person Agreement
(14) A Alec, tusa a bhfuil an Barla aige . . . (Irish)
Hey Alec you aN is the English at-him
Hey Alec, you that know(s) English, . . .
Anti-Number Agreement
(15) Na daoine a chuirfeadh isteach ar an phost sin (Irish)
The men C put-cond-3sg in for the job that
The men that would apply for that job
Anti-Gender Agreement
(16) D amhileid a chuir thu am peann ann (Sc. Gaelic)
Which the.bag-Fem C put you the pen in-3-Masc
Which bag did you put the pen in
Anti-Case Agreement
(17) a. Bha thu agerradh na craoibhe (Sc. Gaelic)
Be-pst you cutting the three-Gen
You were cutting the tree
b. D achraobh a bha thu agerradh
Which tree.Nom C be-pst you cutting
Which tree were you cutting
There is independent evidence that movement is closely related to what
is known in the literature as anti-agreement effects.
Consider the following examples from Fiorentino (Brandi and Cordin
1989).
(18) a. La Maria l venuta
The Maria she is come
Maria came
b. Gli venuto la Maria
It is come the Maria
Maria came
160 Cedric Boeckx
c. Quante ragazze gli venuto con te

How.many girls it is come with you
How many girls came with you
d. *Quante ragazze le sono venute con te
How.many girls they are come with you
(18a) shows that preverbal subjects relate to a -feature matching clitic
(3rd fem sg). In contrast, postverbal subjects do not (18b), the clitic bearing
default morphology. (18c) and (18d) show that subject extraction requires
the use of a non-agreeing clitic. Based on (18c), we could conclude (as did
Rizzi 1982) that in standard Italian examples like (19), subject extraction
takes place from a postverbal position related to a silent non-agreeing clitic
(pro), which obviates the [that-trace] effect.
(19) Chi hai detto che __ e partito
Who has said that is left
Who did he say that left
In a similar vein, the fact that objects are islands for standard wh-extraction
in languages with object agreement, like Basque (20), suggests that agree-
ment turns an otherwise transparent domain (object) into an island. (Datum
from Uriagereka 1998.)
(20) *Nori buruzko sortu zitusten aurreko asteko istiluek zurrumurruak
Who about-of create scandals last week scandals rumors
Who have last weeks scandals caused [rumors about] (Basque)
If true, this line of research would indicate that agreement plays an important
key role in a module of grammar where its role has so far been neglected.
It may also indicate that the A-domain (typically defined by agreement relations)
and the A-bar domain interact much more closely than previously thought.
Let me close this section on WIs vs. SIs by noting that much of the
research into the nature of SIs makes an assumption well captured by the
following statement by Postal (1997: 5): while there is far from agreement
on what principles separate islands from non-islands, the many partially
diverse approaches share a key property [ . . . ]: constituents are in effect
taken to be non-islands by default. The problem for theory construction
then reduces to a search for principles assigning some constituents to the
island category ( . . . ).
Postal points out that taking elements to be non-islands by default may
just be the wrong perspective if one aims at a natural characterization of
islandhood. This is in essence Cinques (1978) proposal that constituents
are taken to be islands by default, and that a special clause needs to
be added to let extraction take place in a minimal set of cases (see also
Gazdar 1981). For Cinque, such domains were cyclic domains, defined
as in (21).
Islands 161
(21) Cyclic domain

A cyclic domain is any sequence of clauses Ci, . . . Cn (where
, . . . Cn may be null) such that Ci+1 is embedded in Ci as an
argument (clause) of the predicate of Ci, in logical form, for each
i (1 < i < n)
Postals point is this: taking constituents to be non-islands by default
leads to the formation of a heterogeneous group. In contrast, taking
constituents to be islands by default results in a very small set: complements.
Evidence from the heterogeneity of islands has recently emerged, and may
well prove Postal right.
Building on Merchant (2001), Boeckx and Lasnik (2006) observe that
not all locality conditions can be circumvented by ellipsis. Specially, they
note that the ban on preposition stranding (typically treated as an island,
where the PP constitutes an opaque domain that must be pied-piped for
movement to be licit), and superiority effects cannot be saved under
sluicing, unlike other kinds of islands.
They conclude that those locality conditions that cannot be circumvented
under sluicing such as superiority must be as derivational conditions,
reflecting how narrow syntax works (and therefore immune to interface
operations such as ellipsis). In contrast, those islands that can be circumvented
under sluicing should be treated representational, interface conditions.
Such an approach would indicate that the grammar needs to encode both
derivational and representational conditions (see Lasnik 2001 and Aoun
and Li 2003 on this point).
A similar conclusion could be made on the basis of the experimental
data analyzed in Sprouse (2007). Sprouses study is particularly relevant, as
he shows that some facts used to show that some islands are better explained
in terms of processing, such as satiation effects (see Snyder 2000), in fact
indicate that islands behave remarkably uniformly, once various factors are
controlled for; while other tasks, involving wh-in-situ and resumption,
suggest that not all islands pattern alike.
Finally, Stepanov (2001, 2007) observes that a uniform treatment of SIs
fails to capture the fact that the subject island is cross-linguistically less
robust than the adjunct island. Although cross-linguistic variation in
principle bears on this issue, caution is required. To be compelling the
argument ought to be built on several things that are currently missing
from Stepanovs study. Simply observing the differences will not do. For
example, Stepanovs argument fails to take into account the fact that the
notion subject is not a primitive of the theory. It has been defined since
Chomskys (1965) over certain configurations, whose cross-linguistic
applicability is itself subject to variation. Put differently, what counts as
subject in Irish need not be the same as what counts as subject in
Swahili. So, when one says that some languages allow subject island
violations, one must make sure that extraction takes place out of a
162 Cedric Boeckx
constituent in the same configuration as the one that Huang (1982) concen-
trated on. It may well turn out to be the case that some kinds of
subject configurations are as stable islands as adjuncts are (see Gallego
2007 for evidence in favor of this suggestion). Put differently, the adjunct
island may appear more robust because the term adjunct is used more
consistently across studies on various languages.
Be that as it may, the above remarks point to the need for better
empirical arguments in favor of a uniform treatment of islands.
5. Conclusion
Let me take stock. As the above discussion makes clear, despite intensive
research for over three decades, islands remain a rich source of puzzles
touching on the very foundation of linguistic theory.
While we can say with some confidence that we have a good grasp of
the descriptive terrain to be covered, things are much less clear on the
explanatory side. Although the distinction between weak islands (minimality
islands) and strong islands (spell-out islands) has is often invoked in the
literature, island circumvention data reveal that perhaps it is mistake to
unify islands, even under two umbrellas. Island circumvention data also
suggest that some kinds of dependency are possible across most islands. If
conditions like superiority are not viewed as island effects, then we can
perhaps strengthen the statement just made and say that no island is a true
island where a true island would be a truly impenetrable domain. As
Ross suspected, all islands must be relativized to the kind of processes
available in the grammar.
Needless to say, the strength of the island circumvention data depends
on how ellipsis and resumption (as well as pied-piping and wh-in-situ) are
treated at the theoretical level. Here too, the consensus view that has
recently emerged, which treats island circumvention as repair at the interfaces
(Merchant 2001; Lasnik 2001), may not be quite right. It may be that once
the range of dependencies is suitably refined, no repair is needed at the
interfaces, since no violation was ever incurred (see Boeckx 2003 for a defense
of such a view in the domain of resumption, and Boeckx forthcoming
and Wang 2007 for an extension of it to the domain of ellipsis). One can
only hope that advances in psycholinguistics will add to the data base, and
help us decide which theoretical views are to be favored (for prime exam-
ples of how psycholinguistics may help, see Phillips 2006 and Sprouse
2007).
Looking back at the dominant analyses of islands, it is impossible not to
be struck by how conservative the field has remained ever since Chomsky
(1973) outlined one possible approach to conditions on transformations. It
may well be that the degree of restrictiveness achieved there was already
such that only a few options can be entertained, or it may be that we have
not be willing to explore too many options.
Islands 163
The future will tell us if we have been right to hold to consensus views
for so long.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Norbert Hornstein, Dennis Ott, Terje Lohndal, Angel Gallego,
and two reviewers for comments.
Short Biography
Cedric Boeckx is Associate Professor of Linguistics at Harvard University.
He received his PhD from the University of Connecticut in 2001. He has
held visiting positions at the Universities of Illinois and Maryland. His
research interests are in theoretical syntax, comparative grammar, and
architectural questions of language, including its origins and its development
in children and its neurobiological basis. He is the author of Islands and
Chains (John Benjamins, 2003); Linguistic Minimalism (Oxford University
Press, 2006); and Understanding Minimalist Syntax (Blackwell, 2007); co-editor
with Kleanthes K. Grohmann of Multiple Wh-fronting (John Benjamins,
2003); and co-author with Howard Lasnik and Juan Uriagereka of A
Course in Minimalist Syntax (Blackwell, 2005). He has published numerous
articles in journals such as Linguistic Inquiry and Natural Language &
Linguistic Theory.
Notes
* Correspondence address: Cedric Boeckx, Department of Linguistics, Harvard University,
Boylston Hall 313, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. Email: cboeckx@fas.harvard.edu.
1
The centrality of locality is attested not only in studies in transformational grammar; it holds
throughout the theoretical syntax literature; see in particular Sag 2005 for an insightful review
of the issue of locality from the perspective of constraint-based approaches, such as Head-
Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG). Islands have also played a central role in tree-adjoining
grammar models (see Frank 2002 for valuable discussion).
2
On the parallelism between bounding nodes, barriers, and phases, see Boeckx and Grohmann
(2007) and Boeckx (2007: Chapter 3). See also Gallego 2007.
3
On the development of cyclicity, see Freidin 1999 and Lasnik 2006.
4
For an extensive discussion of successive cyclicity, see Boeckx 2007.
5
For an excellent review, focusing on the development of the Empty Category Principle (ECP)
proposed in Chomsky (1981), see Hornstein and Weinberg 1995. See also Manzini 1992.
6
The external systems are very often called C-I (conceptual-intentional), and S-M (sensori-
motor), which interface with syntax via Logical Form (LF) and Phonetic Form (PF), respec-
tively. But a richer conception of the interfaces may incorporate conditions on discourse
mapping, as investigated by Erteschik-Shir (1973, 2007) (see also Goldberg 2006, from a
different theoretical perspective).
7
It is fair to say that such theories are often offered as proof-of-concept that island constraints
can be explained by processing factors. I do not know of any processing account that tackles
the richness of island data that forms the basis of competence theories.
8
This view is to be kept separate from views that take grammatical constraints like subjacency
to have a functional motivation to be found in the structure of the parser (see in particular
Berwick and Weinberg 1984; Weinberg 1988).
164 Cedric Boeckx
9
This is, again, true not only in the transformational generative literature; see, for example,
Levine and Huraki (2006), who offers a unified treatment of islands in an HPSG framework.
10
I must stress that choosing among theoretical alternatives cannot solely be said to be an
empirical matter. The very act of deciding how to weigh the evidence cannot be executed
without theoretical assumptions. As usual, one hopes that the most adequate analysis of the data
will be compatible with the most natural assumptions.
11
Although alternative treatments, based on very rich semantic representations, exist. For a
detailed exposition, see Szabolcsi 2006 and references therein.
12
Boeckx (2003) tried to go a little bit further in this respect. He argues that chains can contain
at most strong positions, where strong position can be equated with [+wh]-checking position
or with strong agreement. (See Boeckx 2003 a for a more precise characterization; for a similar
intuition, see Richards 1997, 2001; Rizzi 2006; Rizzi and Shlonsky 2007.) As a result of this
ban on chains that are too strong, elements that normally agree (A-type agreement, or what
Chomsky 2001 calls complete -feature agreement) must fail to agree (i.e., anti-agree) in
order for them to successfully enter into a checking relation with an A-bar target (Wh-/A-bar-
feature checking).
The intuition behind Boeckxs analysis is Last Resort. Once a chain contains a strong position
(of any kind), it cannot contain another, equally strong position (of any kind).
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Language and Linguistics Compass 2/1 (2008): 151167, 10.1111/j.1749-818x.2007.00043.

(1) *[A W]i . . . [ . . . [A Z [A ti]]]

(3) a. Handsome though I believe that Dick is, Im still going

Indeed, much work after Conditions on Transformations solidified

2. Why Should Islands Exist?

(7) *Whose did you buy [__ book]

dependency is established across the island. In contrast, depending on how

(11) Ni xiangxin Lisi mai-le sheme de shuofa

(12) *Ni xiangxin Lisi weisheme lai de shuofa

4. Asymmetries Among Islands

(13) > > (> indicates c-command)

SIs have so far received a less satisfactory treatment. Most approaches

agreement will be impervious to those instances of movement that require

c. Quante ragazze gli venuto con te

(21) Cyclic domain

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