Volume 7 · Issue 4 · December 2020
Island Constraints in English and Kurdish
Burhan Qadir Saleem
In transformational grammar, there are rules such as relativization, questioning and topicalization, in which elements abandon their position and move to the front of the sentence. The present study focusses on certain islands in English and Kurdish and examines whether these islands constrain the extraction of elements in Kurdish or not. It is hypothesized that islandhood is not only bout the restrictions on the extraction of an element and putting it in front of the sentence. In Kurdish, even if the question word remains in-situ, there are islands that impose restrictions on forming structures such as interrogatives.
