Syntactic Experimental Evidence on Acceptability Variations of Wh-Island Effects in Chinese
Mengkai Wang
July 2024 

Wh-island effects, as an ungrammatical phenomenon that presents two wh-phrases at the fronted and the intervener positions in a sentence, have been reported to be ameliorated in terms of acceptability by self-repetition and morpho-syntactic features argued by an influential syntactic theory of Featural Relativized Minimality. However, languages low-susceptible to wh-island effects like Chinese are poorly verified. This study is aimed to test the previous findings and explore new recommendations for Featural Relativized Minimality, employing two acceptability experiments in Chinese to separately examine satiation effects and amelioration variations, both carefully involving morpho-syntactic and semantic features. Fifty participants were recruited to rate sentences with wh-island violations. The results show that no amelioration will appear only by self-repetition and that the wh-amelioration variations can be accounted for by an incorporation of morpho-syntactic features and semantic representations. The implications of the findings are that more languages and syntactic experimental conditions should be studied from multiple perspectives to enrich the understanding of wh-island amelioration.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/008280 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Under Submission
keywords:	wh-island effects; acceptability variations; amelioration; featural relativized minimality; similarity-based interference, syntax
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