Island phenomena and related matters

Extraction constraints on long-distance dependencies - so-called islands - have been the subject of intense linguistic and psycholinguistic research for the last half century. Despite of their importance in syntactic theory, the heterogeneity of island constraints has posed many difficult challenges to linguistic theory, across all frameworks. The HPSG perspective of island phenomena is that they are unlikely to be due to a unitary syntactic constraint given the fact that virtually all such island constraints have known exceptions. Rather, it is more plausible that island constraints result from a combination of independently motivated syntactic, semantic, pragmatic and processing phenomena. The present chapter is somewhat different from others in this volume in that its focus is not on HPSG analyses of some phenomena, but rather on the nature of the phenomena itself. This is because there is evidence that most of the phenomena are not purely grammatical, and to that extent independent from HPSG or indeed any theory of grammar. One may call this view of island phenomena "minimalist" in the sense that much of it does not involve formal grammar.