1 Experimental syntax and island effects: Toward a comprehensive theory of islands

One of the most pervasive properties of human language is the existence of dependencies: necessary relationships that hold between two elements in a sentence. The primary objects of study in this volume are long-distance “fillergap” dependencies – a special subset of dependencies that are not constrained by standard measures of length such as number of words or number of clauses. For example, wh-questions in English (1) contain a long-distance dependency between the wh-word at the beginning of the sentence and a theta-role assigning element (such as a verb or preposition) later in the sentence that selects the wh-word as a semantic argument. We will adopt a relatively theory-neutral terminology and call the end of this dependency the gap position, indicated by an underscore in examples. The pattern in (1a–1c) suggests that long-distance dependency between wh-words and gap positions in English can be separated by any number of embedded sentences:1