Island Perspectives

Welcome

Since Ross's (1967) dissertation, the constraints on long-distance dependencies dubbed "islands" have been at the forefront of linguistic investigation. They have had tremendous impact on theories of grammar, parsing, and acquisition, and to this day remain a source of productive research. Our workshop aims to take stock of the state-of-the-art approaches to island phenomena, and re-assess the balance of explanation among several domains of inquiry:

syntactic constraints and processes;

constraints on the interpretation of extraction from island domains;

processing models of real-time dependency formation; and

functional or pragmatic constraints on island-creating configurations.

This year's Mayfest 2008 is supported by the NSF project: "Islands and Linearization" (Norbert Hornstein, Juan Uriagereka, & Howard Lasnik). Read the project description here.

Mayfest 2008 has no registration fee and is open to all interested guests. We strongly encourage anyone with an interest in theoretical and experimental linguistic research to attend our workshop. Click here to register online!

Invited Speakers

Abstracts

Cedric Boeckx (Harvard University): No Merge is an Island

Peter Culicover (The Ohio State University): Beyond Simpler Syntax: Processing complexity and explaining island phenomena

Nomi Erteschik-Shir (Ben-Gurion University): Processing Information Structure: an Account of Islandhood

Robert Frank (Johns Hopkins University): The varieties of syntactic dependencies and the genesis of islandhood

Robert Kluender (University of California, San Diego): Islands on the brain: How event-related potentials componentry might help get us off the islands

Kyle Johnson (University of Massachusetts, Amherst): Fitting islands to the semantics of movement

Jason Merchant (University of Chicago): PF and LF locality: Evidence from Greek comparatives

Philip Hofmeister (UC San Diego) & Ivan Sag (Stanford University): Processing Factors in the Study of Island Effects

Bonnie Schwartz (University of Hawai'i at Manoa): Island sensitivity in development: A perspective from L2 adults, L2 children and L1 youths

Anna Szabolcsi (New York University): What Natural Classes of (Weak) Islands?

About the Mayfest

Mayfest is an annual workshop organized by the graduate students in the Department of Linguistics. The aim of the meeting is to present the current state of debate in a particular domain of interest to a variety of language researchers. "Mayfest 2008: Island Perspectives" marks the 10th Mayfest. View old Mayfest web sites.