Reparing *-making and Island Violations*

Abstract

Since Ross (1969), it has been widely adopted that island violations are ameliorated by ellipsis. Recently, however, Merchant (2004, 2008, 2010) observes that some island-violations that are expected to be ameliorated by ellipsis are not. He claims that XPs that cross an island leave *-features on intermediate traces outside the island node and that island effects will be attested unless the *-features are all deleted. In this squib, however, we argue that Merchants account is not required and thus should not be adopted by showing that all of the examples Merchant presents can be fully accounted for by an independently motivated requirement, Parallelism (cf. Fox and Lasnik 2003). We also suggest that Chomskys (1972) analysis of islands, which has been refuted by many authors including Merchant (cf. Chung, Ladusaw, and McClosky 1995), can be resurrected as a viable one.