Islands, expressiveness, and the theory/formalism confusion.

I Subregular linguistics: bridging theoretical linguistics and formal grammar i (henceforth SL) argues that Subregular Linguistics (the application of very restricted subclasses of finite-state machinery to natural language) offers many profitable insights to theoretical linguistics, such as providing a unified view of phonology, morphology, and syntax, leveraging learnability considerations for informing the derivation of typological restrictions, and deriving island constraints from the computational nature of movement. 3.2 Restrictive formalisms and island phenomena SL's goal of seeking ever more restrictive metalanguages for the description of syntax ultimately stems from a research program introduced long ago, which is similarly intent on explaining away islands as syntactic phenomena. We believe that SL's goal is misguided - as is previous work in a similar vein discussed in Section 3.2 below - in that it assumes a kind of I native grammatical realism i : grammar formalisms are taken to be real in some cognitive sense, and to bear some deep relation to the psychology of language. 4 Conclusion The research program that SL builds on assumes that the ideal grammar formalism should impose restrictive expressiveness on the theory. [Extracted from the article]