Recent research has highlighted a remarkable variability in subject island effects. Focusing on intransitive verbs and adjectives, we argue that islandhood is determined at the syntax-semantics interface: subjects qualify as islands when they are interpreted outside the predicative nucleus of the clause, in a categorical LF structure ( Ladusaw 1994 ); they are transparent for extraction when they undergo total reconstruction into the predicative nucleus, giving rise to a thetic structure. The thetic/categorical interpretation depends on various factors (most notably the stage-level versus individual-level nature of the predicate), whose interaction accounts for the observed variability of island effects, as shown by our experimental evidence. The relevance of subject reconstruction need not be stipulated; rather, it follows from a top-down-oriented computation, in which movement dependencies are implemented by a storage-and-retrieval mechanism.

Borsley (1997) criticizes the raising analysis of relative clauses revived by Kayne (1994) in the framework of antisymmetry theory. Most of his remarks concern the analysis of English headed relative clauses. This article presents a revised version of Kayne's proposal that provides an answer to these criticisms. It is argued that the raising approach is indeed tenable and that the analysis of this empirical domain is fully consistent with the restrictiveness of the antisymmetry theory.