A syntactic island is a linguistic location that blocks movement processes occurring, making the sentence “Guess who John saw Harry and?” ungrammatical. For 10 points each:
[10e] Name this type of sentence, which is affected in the most common example of syntactic islands in English. One type of this kind of sentence is named for wh-words (“w-h-words”), while another is named for yes and no.
ANSWER: questions [or interrogative sentences; or interrogative clauses; accept yes-no questions or wh-questions]
[10h] This linguist discovered and named syntactic islands. This University of North Texas syntactician, who died in 2025, also popularized the squib as a short article format.
ANSWER: John Robert Ross [or Haj (“HODGE”) Ross]
[10m] This linguistic argument is supported by child speech obeying syntactic islands, despite them being rare in the input. This argument for universal grammar claims that the input is insufficient without innate linguistic knowledge.
ANSWER: poverty of the stimulus [prompt on Plato’s problem]
<Benjamin McAvoy-Bickford, Social Science>