Islands and Barriers To Movement
Since it was first proposed, the theory of syntactic movement yielded a new field of research aiming at providing the filters that block certain types of movement, also called locality theory. Locality theory is interested in discerning the islands and barriers to movement. It strives to identify the categories and constellations that block movement from occurring. In other words, one wants to understand why certain attempts at movement fail, e.g.
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- a. You think that Mary visited Peter before calling Fred.
- b. *Who do you think that Mary visited Peter before calling ___?
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- a. Your picture of Fred was funny.
- b. *Who was your picture of ___ funny?
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- a. You like Bill's ideas.
- b. *Whose do you like ___ ideas?
The b-sentences are now all disallowed due to locality constraints on movement. Adjuncts and subjects are islands that block movement, and left branches in NPs are barriers that prevent pre-noun modifiers from being extracted out of NPs.
Read more about this topic: Syntactic Movement
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