The Island Effect in the Postverbal Construction in Japanese

It has been generally assumed that a violation of island constraints indicates that the relevant syntactic phenomena involves movement. That is, if what look like displacements violate island constraints but remain acceptable, this means that they should not be derived by movement. A careful examination of postverbal constructions in Japanese reveals that no movement is involved in the derivation of the construction despite the fact that in some cases island effects are observed. The effects, which have up to now been dealt with purely in syntax, can receive a better account in terms of language processing. This suggests that the human parser should undertake explanations of part of the output of the competence system.