Islands and Barriers To Movement
Since it was first proposed, the theory of syntactic movement yielded a new field of research aiming at providing the filters that block certain types of movement, also called locality theory. Locality theory is interested in discerning the islands and barriers to movement. It strives to identify the categories and constellations that block movement from occurring. In other words, one wants to understand why certain attempts at movement fail, e.g.
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- a. You think that Mary visited Peter before calling Fred.
- b. *Who do you think that Mary visited Peter before calling ___?
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- a. Your picture of Fred was funny.
- b. *Who was your picture of ___ funny?
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- a. You like Bill's ideas.
- b. *Whose do you like ___ ideas?
The b-sentences are now all disallowed due to locality constraints on movement. Adjuncts and subjects are islands that block movement, and left branches in NPs are barriers that prevent pre-noun modifiers from being extracted out of NPs.
Read more about this topic: Syntactic Movement
Famous quotes containing the words islands, barriers and/or movement:
“Consider the islands bearing the names of all the saints, bristling with forts like chestnut-burs, or Echinidæ, yet the police will not let a couple of Irishmen have a private sparring- match on one of them, as it is a government monopoly; all the great seaports are in a boxing attitude, and you must sail prudently between two tiers of stony knuckles before you come to feel the warmth of their breasts.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“... in love, barriers cannot be destroyed from the outside by the one to whom the cause despair, no matter what he does; and it is only when he is no longer concerned with them that, suddenly, as a result of work coming from elsewhere, accomplished within the one who did not love him, these barriers, formerly attacked without success, fall futilely.”
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“Our movement took a grip on cowardly Marxism and from it extracted the meaning of socialism. It also took from the cowardly middle-class parties their nationalism. Throwing both into the cauldron of our way of life there emerged, as clear as a crystal, the synthesis—German National Socialism.”
—Hermann Goering (1893–1946)