Islands May 2026

"Who did you see [a picture of ___]?" (The phrase is the object).

Extracting from a subject might simply be too mentally taxing for the brain to process in real-time. Exceptions and "Parasitic" Gaps Islands

A occurs when the grammatical subject of a sentence acts as one of these barriers. In English, you can usually extract a word from the object of a sentence, but doing the same to the subject results in an ill-formed "island violation". "Who did you see [a picture of ___]