Extraction Islands
In many cases, a wh-expression can occur at the front of a sentence regardless of how far away its canonical location is, e.g.
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- a. Who does Mary like __?
- b. Who does Bob know that Mary likes __?
- c. Who does Carl believe that Bob knows that Mary likes __?
The wh-word word who is the direct object of the verb likes in each of these sentences. There appears to be no limits on the distance that can separate the fronted expression from its canonical position. In more technical terms, we can say that the dependency relation between the gap (the canonical, empty position) and its filler (the wh-expression) is unbounded in the sense that there is no upper bound on how deeply embedded within the given sentence the gap may appear.
However, there are cases in which this is not possible. Certain kinds of phrases do not seem to allow a gap. The phrases from which a wh-word cannot be extracted are referred to as extraction islands or simply islands. The following subsections briefly consider seven types of islands: 1) adjunct islands, 2) wh-islands, 3) subject islands, 4) left branch islands, 5) coordinate structure islands, 6) complex NP islands, and 7) non-bridge islands. These islands types were all originally identified in Ross' seminal dissertation. The islands in the examples that follow are underlined in the a-sentences.
Read more about this topic: Wh-movement
Famous quotes containing the words extraction and/or islands:
“Logic is the last scientific ingredient of Philosophy; its extraction leaves behind only a confusion of non-scientific, pseudo problems.”
—Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970)
“The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea. It was a phase of this problem that caused the Civil War.”
—W.E.B. (William Edward Burghardt)