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The present article sets out to analyse two types of syntactic islands, namely, the embedding of an adverbial clause, and the relativization of an element within an embedded clause functioning as a NP. In the first type, the relative pronoun is subcategorised by the verb of the embedded clause, and not by the relative verb, in such a way that the relativised case is expressed via a reasumptive pronoun or adverb.
In the second type, the relativizer opts to maintain the case assigned to it by the relative verb, rather than becoming the complement of the embedded clause via a preposition.
The introduction of the 'relative clause plus complementizer' pattern has enjoyed a greater acceptance in the Romance languages than in the Slavic languages, resulting in a greater tendency of the former to build complex relativizations such as the syntactic islands, facilitated by the insertion of the reasumptive. This element marks grammatical relations among constituents that surface apart in the syntagmatic chain.
As far as Basque is concerned, the tendency is to avoid these constructions, with the exception of those occurrences where the syntactic island corresponds to an embedded clause functioning as a NP. In this case, the verbal morphology may undergo a number of changes that points to the prevalence of syntagmatic contiguity over the proper syntactic relations
