EXTRACTION AND RECONSTRUCTION

The possibility of extraction across a wh-island is usually assumed to be dependent on whether or not the constituent in question can undergo "long" (i.e., nonlocal) Ā-movement across the island. However, the question of how to make a principled distinction between those elements which can violate locality and those which cannot is still rather controversial. I will propose that there are no well-formed locality violations in these cases, and that the grammaticality patterns observed derive from a semantic filter on the escape hatch used to bypass the island. In other words, if a phrase is extracted across a wh-island, it must adjoin to the island in order to get by. This adjunction site is restricted by the interpretive component: only traces which are interpreted as variables of type e can occur in this position, while higher-order variables are not allowed. This restriction is shown to capture the known facts about wh-island violations, as well as some less known phenomena, such as the absence of functional (and pair-list) readings across wh-islands.