Variations in the Wh-island Effects of Wh-in-Situ in Korean - A Garden Path Approach

Abstract

Although wh-in-situ in Korean are known to show wh-island effects, there exist various environments where they show no wh-island effects. No satisfactory accounts are available for all the cases, and the goal of this paper is to show that there is a way to explain them once we recognize that wh-in-situ questions with a non-local wh-Q association, under the processing approach to island effects, are garden path sentences and that what is called the wh-island effects of wh-in-situ in Korean is not the ungrammaticality of wh-in-situ questions with a non-local wh-Q association but the high likelihood of misinterpreting such questions as having the local scope. Once we do so, explaining the variations in wh-island effects can be recast as explaining the variations in misinterpretation rates, and I explain them by first identifying various factors contributing to the (un)likelihood of misinterpretation and then showing that all the observed variations can be explained in terms of them.