Island Constraints: Theory, Acquisition and Processing

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A collection of articles on the theory, acquisition and processing of island constraints. The book is unique in taking an interdisciplinary approach to a syntactic phenomenon that has been at the centre of linguistic debates since the 1960s. Both transformational and non-transformational approaches to island constraints are represented. The papers in the volume show how data from empirical studies of the role of island constraints in processing and acquistition by normals and by special populations can contribute to our understanding of broad issues concerning the representation of linguistic structures in the mind, including the interplay between lexical, pragmatic and syntactic knowledge. In addition, they contribute vital data to specific on-going debates in processing and development, such as the emergence of movement rules in children’s grammars and the temporal ordering of events in the analysis of discontinuous dependencies by the language processor. The papers in the volume exploit examples from a variety of languages and use a variety of experimental techniques to marshal arguments for specific models of the theory of island constraints and their deployment in real-time language acquisition and language processing.