Adjunct Islands in English: Theoretical Perspectives and Experimental Evidence

Island phenomena are a central topic in generative grammar, especially because of principled exceptions to these general extraction constraints. This volume investigates exceptional extractions from phrasal adjunct islands. It argues, based on experimental studies, that several factors identified in the previous literature are uninformative about locality conditions because they show effects in both extraction and non-extraction sentence forms. The volume develops a multifactorial model to account for these effects without appealing to universal extraction conditions and argues that the relative acceptability of the underlying proposition determines acceptability across sentence types.

Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: de Gruyter Mouton
Published: 06/30/2025
ISBN: 9783112215173
Pages: 345
Weight: 1.07lbs
Size: 9.21h x 6.14w x 0.78d