Minimalist Parsing of Subjects Displaced from Embedded Clauses in Free Word Order Languages

In Sayeed and Szpakowicz (2004), we proposed a parser inspired by some aspects of the Minimalist Program. This incremental parser was designed specifically to handle discontinuous constituency phenomena for NPs in Latin. We take a look at the application of this parser to a specific kind of apparent island violation in Latin involving the extraction of constituents, including subjects, from tensed embedded clauses. We make use of ideas about the left periphery from Rizzi (1997) to modify our parser in order to handle apparently violated subject islands and similar phenomena.