The Syntax-Semantics Interface of Pair-list Interpretation in Wh/Wh Constructions: A Syntactic and Experimental & Cognitive-neuroscientific Approach

Abstract

This paper takes a syntactic approach to Superiority in English. Since Chomsky (1973), Superiority has been at the forefront of syntactic analysis. However, Pesetsky (1987) argues that the semantic or discourse property of D-linking plays an important role in circumventing a Superiority violation. More recently, Sag et al. (2008) argue that Superiority does not hold in Universal Grammar, accounting for apparent Superiority effects in terms of processing. In response to these recent attempts, in this paper we first provided a syntactic account for Superiority. We argue that the superior wh-phrase behaves differently from the inferior one, and that the movement of the latter over the former forms a chain whose links are preserved at LF. Therefore, locality-violating chain links for Superiority-violating movement are kept intact, causing an LF crash. Building on this syntactic analysis, we conducted an event-related potentials (ERP) study of a set of examples involving Superiority. It was found that P600 as one of the ERP components was evoked by the examples where Superiority is violated and at the same time the wh-in-situ is non-D-linked or bare, and that another ERP component of LAN was evoked at the verb when an apparently Superiority-violating wh-moved expression is not D-linked. Since P600 has been well regarded as a reliable index signaling syntactic ill-formedness, our finding points to the fact that the nature of Superiority is syntactic.