Mayfest is an annual workshop organized by the graduate students in the Department of Linguistics. "Mayfest 2008: Island Perspectives" marked the 10th Mayfest. We are pleased to present the first multimedia proceedings from this conference. The aim of Mayfest is to present the current state of debate in a particular domain of interest to a variety of language researchers. We hope that multimedia proceedings can facilitate further discussion even after the conference and make the ideas more accessible to a wider audience. If you couldn't be there or if you would like to relive your experience, we have compiled all handouts and slides as well as audio recordings of the talks and the discussions on this website.
This year's workshop hosted talks discussing the impact of islands on theories of grammar, parsing, and acquisition. The main aim was to take stock of the state-of-the-art approaches to island phenomena, and re-assess the balance of explanation among several domains of inquiry:
Mayfest 2008 was supported by the NSF project: "Islands and Linearization" (Norbert Hornstein, Juan Uriagereka, & Howard Lasnik). We thank the speakers, participants, and organizers of this conference for making this program a success.