Islands

The second gap is inside an "island," but the first "licit" gap makes the whole sentence feel okay to a native speaker.

Many generative grammarians argue that islands are a result of the of human language.

Linguists debate whether these "walls" are built into our mental grammar or caused by how we process information. 1. The Architectural View Islands

A occurs when the grammatical subject of a sentence acts as one of these barriers. In English, you can usually extract a word from the object of a sentence, but doing the same to the subject results in an ill-formed "island violation".

Extracting from a subject might simply be too mentally taxing for the brain to process in real-time. Exceptions and "Parasitic" Gaps The second gap is inside an "island," but

Not all subject islands are equally strong. Some violations become acceptable if they are "saved" by a second gap in the sentence, known as a .

"Which book did you file ___ [without reading ___]?" Extracting from a subject might simply be too

Some researchers suggest the problem isn't grammar, but .