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Chinese Wh-in-Situ and Islands: A Formal Judgment Study

It has long been assumed that argument wh-in-situ in Chinese is not sensitive to islands, unlike adjunct wh-in-situ (Huang 1982a,b, Tsai 1994a,b, 1999, Cheng 2009). On the basis of a formal acceptabilityrating experiment (Sprouse 2007, Sprouse, Wagers, and Phillips 2012, Sprouse and Hornstein 2013), this squib shows that, contrary to this long-standing generalization, both argument and adjunct wh-in-situ are sensitive to complex NP islands (Ross 1967). We argue that our finding is most compatible with the theory of wh-in-situ whereby both argument and adjunct wh-phrases undergo a similar movement process, namely, phrasal movement. Studies of wh-in-situ in Chinese have identified the following generalization, known as the argument-adjunct asymmetry: argument wh-in-situ (e.g., shenme ‘what’, shei ‘who’) is not sensitive to islands, but adjunct wh-in-situ (e.g., weishenme ‘why’, zenmeyang ‘how’) is severely constrained by islands (Huang 1982a,b, Xu 1990, Lasnik and Saito 1992, Tsai 1994a,b, 1999). For example, in (1a) and (1b), respectively, a wh-DP (shenme ‘what’) and a wh-adjunct (weishenme ‘why’) are embedded within a relative clause (the Complex NP Constraint; Ross 1967). It has been reported that (1a) is more acceptable than (1b) (examples from Tsai 1999:42–43).