Experimental Syntax and Island Effects by Cambridge University Press

by Norbert Hornstein

This volume takes an empirical approach to an important syntactic phenomenon - the 'island'. For the first time, leading linguists and psycholinguists set the topic within an empirical context. This book is ideal for students and researchers interested in cutting-edge experimental techniques in linguistics, psycholinguistics and psychology.

Genres: Linguistics

Hardcover

First published October 17, 2013

Reviews

[Brent Woo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great introduction to the primary literature. While Cowart's Experimental Syntax is a hands-on manual, walking you through how to conduct acceptability experiments, this volume gives (1) a great overview of the debate about islands and (2) exposure to dozens of experiments to study and learn methodology from. Part I rehashes the great debate in Language between Sprouse et al and Hofmeister et al -- are island effects the result of grammatical or processing/Working Memory constraints? Part II discusses specific issues in islands, either specific types of islands like Negative Islands, or specific grammatical artifacts associated with islands like resumptive pronouns. The entire book is valuable as an implicit reference guide for methodology, presenting and discussing results, and embedding your research question in the literature in a meaningful way.

Most interesting to me was the Pearl & Sprouse Computational model, which gives a very slim and plausible statistical learning model for islands. Also interesting was the Goldberg chapter on unifying islands through a constraint on information structure.