This book presents a novel semantic account of weak islands, structures that block the displacement of certain elements in a sentence. Dr Abrusan's argument that the behaviour of these constructions has a semantic rather than syntactic explanation removes some of the most important reasons for postulating abstract syntactic rules as part of UG.

Márta Abrusán is a CNRS research scientist at the Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse at the Université Paul Sabatier. After her PhD in linguistics at MIT she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Collegium Budapest, the Institut Jean-Nicod in Paris and the universities of Oxford and Göttingen. Her published work includes papers in Linguistics and Philosophy, Natural Language Semantics, Semantics and Pragmatics and the Journal of Semantics.

• 1: Introduction


• 2: Presuppositional islands


• 3: Negative islands


• 4: Wh-islands


• 5: Quasi-islands and quantificational interveners


• 6: Analyticity and grammar