Phases and islands
This chapter discusses and reviews the notion of island in the context of the framework of phases, delving into Chomsky’s (2008) claim that the specifiers of phase heads v* and C (the so-called edges) impose locality restrictions that give rise to island effects –by and large, of the type Huang (1982) explored. After reviewing different cross linguistic evidence, I conclude, following Boeckx (2003a), that the Subject Condition obtains from the interaction between the Case/agreement systems (Chomsky’s 2000; 2001 Activity Condition) and the mechanics of subextraction processes, a conclusion I extend to both objects and adjuncts. The final part of the chapter is dedicated to the second scenario of what could be called edge-induced islands, which is referred to as Criterial Freezing by Rizzi (2006). I review the data related to this extraction instance, originally reported by Torrego (1985), providing an analysis that denies the role played by both edges and Rizzi’s (2006) interpretation of freezing.