Abstract
In wh-questions that form a syntactic dependency between the fronted wh-phrase and its thematic position, acceptability is severely degraded when the dependency crosses another wh-phrase. It is well known that the acceptability degradation in wh-island violation ameliorates in certain contexts, but the source of this variation remains poorly understood. In the syntax literature, an influential theory – Featural Relativized Minimality – has argued that the wh-island effect is modulated exclusively by the distinctness of morpho-syntactic features in the two wh-phrases, but psycholinguistic theories of memory encoding and retrieval mechanisms predict that semantic properties of wh-phrases should also contribute to wh-island amelioration. We report four acceptability judgment experiments that systematically investigate the role of morpho-syntactic and semantic features in wh-island violations. The results indicate that the distribution of wh-island amelioration is best explained by an account that incorporates the distinctness of morpho-syntactic features as well as the semantic denotation of the wh-phrases. We argue that an integration of syntactic theories and perspectives from psycholinguistics can enrich our understanding of acceptability variation in wh-dependencies.
Highlights
Much work in syntax has investigated the acceptability of English sentences that involve multiple wh-phrases, as in (1):(1) a
While an animacy distinction is clearly relevant, it cannot be captured in featural terms. It is not obvious what featural adjustments could account for the amelioration patterns we have shown in this paper in a way that is entirely internal to the principles of Featural RM.4
Memory Constraints and Semantic Distinctness in Acceptability Variation. These results present a challenge to any account of wh-island effects that assumes that D-linked identity examples are acceptable or fully amelioriated: the variable amelioration effect for even this case suggests that some constraint like Relativized Minimality may well be active
Summary
Much work in syntax has investigated the acceptability of English sentences that involve multiple wh-phrases, as in (1):(1) a. Despite the superficial resemblance of sentences in (1), native speakers of English perceive (1a) as a more acceptable sentence of English than (1b) This example illustrates the so-called wh-island constraint (Chomsky, 1964, 1977; cf Ross, 1967): the grammar disallows dependency formation between the fronted wh-phrase (e.g., what) and its thematic position when there is another intervening wh-phrase (who). Unlike many syntactic theories that only distinguish grammatical from ungrammatical sentences, Featural RM predicts fine variations in acceptability across different types of wh-islands, in particular, how the acceptability of whisland violations can ameliorate depending on the similarity of wh-phrases. We report 4 experiments that explore the empirical predictions of Featural RM, and demonstrate that the theory needs refinement by incorporating aspects of memory encoding and retrieval constraints that guide the real-time computation of syntactic representations
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