ABSTRACT
Recent work on long distance wh-extractions out of wh-islands reveals two kinds o asymmetries with respect to extraction possibilities:
within a language, depending on the categorial type and position of the extraction site (subject, object, NP, PP, V)
across language with respect to a given position and/or category (subject in English versus subject in Italian).
In this article, we suggest that these asymmetries all result from the interaction of a single condition with independently motivated parameters of theta-role and Case assignment. This article first presents the basic condition governing extractions out of wh-islands, then proposes a generalization of this condition, and finally addresses more technical aspects of its integration within grammatical theory.