Kyle Johnson (UMass Amherst)

• ‘An Etiology of Islands’

Recent attempts to ground island phenomena into something more fundamental have focused on that class of islands which falls under Rizzi's Relativized Minimality condition. Less attention has been paid to that class which falls under a generalized version of the Adjunct Condition (as, for example, illustrated by the approaches in Chomsky's "Barriers" and Kayne's "Connectedness"). I will sketch a way of deriving these islands from a modified version of the tree building algorithm that Chomsky proposes in "Bare Phrase Structure," and connect them to the procedure that forms prosodic phrases.