Not Just Islands: Relativized Blocking Throughout the Grammar

Abstract

Recent research in computational linguistics has found that most long-distance linguistic dependencies are tier-based strictly 2-local (TSL-2) over their respective representations, providing a precise characterization of blocking elements in phonology and syntax. A subset of the well-known syntactic island effects have been claimed to be one such class of blockers, explaining their superficial diversity via a common computational basis. This article revisits the TSL-2 analysis of islands in light of subsequent work on other types of syntactic locality constraints and on the treatment of gradient blocking. It finds that the TSL-2 islands display variation and gradience of the sort found in other syntactic blockers, while those islands which are not TSL-2 can be distinguished in this regard. Several directions are suggested for future research on islands and other syntactic locality phenomena.