'Island contraints ' revisited: a functionalist approach in light of the notion of 'idea unit'

This paper introduces a functionalist approach to structures of the “island constraints” type, thus named by Ross (1967) within a generative perspective. We will show that the restrictions those islands impose on the occurrence of constituents in certain structural positions is due to their functional status of “idea units”, therefore not allowing extraction or movement of any of the constituents across their boundaries.