My research focuses on the nature of elliptical phenomena, and uses analysis of the syntactic, semantic, and information structural properties of these phenomena to leverage insight into longstanding linguistic problems.
In my dissertation, I show that one class of elliptical phenomena, known as Stripping, is insensitive to both definite relative clause islands and factive islands. I argue that this island insensitivity cannot be due to one of various evasion strategies, by which no island violation actually occurs in the course the the derivation. Instead, island insensitive Stripping must involve the movement of an ellipsis remnant from within an island domain. This in turn suggests that the constraints on movement imposed by island structures are due to some property that is sensitive to the ellipsis, e.g. the non-pronunciation, of the offending structures. Thus, the island insensitivity of Stripping provides insight into the nature of islands: it suggests that islands are artifacts of the interface between syntax and the phonological component.