Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

Current theories of nominal islands involve a slew of various constraints that are disconnected to more general aspects of the theory of locality. In this talk I briefly introduce an approach to syntax that uses the notion of parthood, as opposed to set membership, as its basic syntactic relation, and define a very simple geometrical locality constraint on the structures the theory generates. I show how that constraint, when combined with the approach to nominal structure motivated in Adger 2013, provides a unified perspective on various kinds of nominal islands and their exceptions, including Specificity Condition effects, verb-selection effects, the semantic type of the nominal, and the impact of various movement configurations.