The Ling Space's video: What Questions Can t We Ask Syntactic Islands

How do we know what questions we can ask? What keeps us from moving words around into whatever order we want? In this week's episode, we talk about syntactic islands: what they are, what rules can allow us to move some words across long distances in a sentence and not others, and what evidence we have from different languages to back these rules up. This is Topic ! This week's tag language: Sinhala! Related videos: Trace Evidence: Syntactic Movement - https://youtu.be/x5iBbSkp8rk A Principled Approach: Principles and Parameters in Universal Grammar - https://youtu.be/GbK0ls7YVN4 Last episode: The Magic of Words: Performative Language - https://youtu.be/uCR3_7-lun4 Other of our morphology and syntax videos: Raising the Bar: What Changes in a Sentence When We Swap Verbs? - https://youtu.be/SYoYNeaSYrU Organizing Meanings: Morphological Typology - https://youtu.be/Ts2DS0ZsTyo Referential Treatment: Pronouns and Binding Theory - https://youtu.be/9sqm_cex4kA If you're taking part in our little April 1st quiz, try to tell us where Kanji has gone - the first person who tells us in the comments will get a free mug of their choice! Find us on all the social media worlds: Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.com/ Twitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpace Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspace/ And at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com/ ! You can also find our store at the website, https://thelingspace.storenvy.com/ Our website also has extra content about this week's topic at http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-66/ We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally. Sources: Most of the information in this episode comes from Andrew Radford's Minimalist Syntax -- Exploring the Structure of English (2004) & Andrew Carnie's Syntax -- A Generative Introduction (2007). We also refer to John R. Ross's dissertation from 1967, Constraints on Variables in Syntax, as well as Noam Chomsky's Conditions on Transformations (1973) and The Minimalist Program (1995). Looking forward to next week!