Interpretive Islands: Evidence for Connectedness and Global Harmony in Logical Form*

The goal of this article is to show how certain problems of German syntax can find a natural solution in a theory which has become known over the last few years as Connectedness Theory (CT). I want to make clear from the very beginning, however, that CT is used here in a rather loose sense, to refer to a class of theoretical developments. It should therefore not be expected that the analyses presented in this paper can be cast in any one fixed version of CT. The common core of these theoretical approaches is that non-local dependencies should be derived from local dependencies. The problems that I will address arise from cases of ungrammaticality, which are prima facie unexpected from the viewpoint of standard Government and Binding Theory. My starting point in approaching the phenomenological array is the behavior of so-called "scalar" or "quantificational" particles like only and even. While these words have attracted a great deal of attention by semanticists, they have received very little attention from syntacticians. As I hope to show in this article, the lack of con-