Wh-islands

70 A syntactic procedure for displacement 4 This determines whether a wh-expression occurs fronted or in situ. The second one is relevant at the top of the dependency. It specifies whether only the outermost form that checks a feature can be concatenated or whether this is possible for all forms that check the relevant feature. This was interpreted in transformational terms as whether a language allows multiple or only uniquely filled specifiers.

English sets these parameters such that split optionally associates the phonological content either with the edge or with the nucleus. Furthermore, English allows only uniquely filled specifiers. Bulgarian splitdiffers in always associating the phonological content with the edge. Furthermore, Bulgarian allows multiple specifiers. Japanesesplit, on the other hand, always associates the phonological content with the nucleus. Whether Japanese employs multiple specifiers or not does not matter for the construction of wh-questions. Setting the parameters in this way derives the three different wh-patterns we observe with these three languages: all wh-expressions occur fronted in Bulgarian, all wh-expressions occur in situ in Japanese, and exactly one wh-expression occurs fronted in English while all others occur in situ.

4.4 Intervention effects 71 This configuration triggersremergeand, analogously to the derivations of the previous section, yields the following result:

hwhom,(what Ishtar granted,(((grant whom)what)ishtar))i

As in the non-converging derivations of English multiple wh-questions, we end up with a non-empty element at the edge (whom, in this case) that has no more features to check and prevents the derivation from converging.

Note that this does not only hold for displacement triggered by a wh-feature.

It is exactly the same for every kind of extraction. So it holds in general that there is no f-displacement out of an f-domain, with f being an arbitrary feature.

If on the other hand there are two expressions that are displaced due to two different features, these two extractions do not conflict. As an illustration, consider the following sentence, where the NPthe Bull of Heavenis topicalized out of a wh-domain created by displacement ofwhere.

(4.18) [The Bull of Heaven]1, Gilgamesh wondered[where Ishtar got 1].

To see how it works, consider the embedded CPwhere Ishtar got. It corresponds to the following expression with both extracting forms, where and the Bull of Heaven, at the edge (I will skip over the semantic dimension):

hthe Bull of Heaven^top,hwhere^wh,(Ishtar got^•wh,. . .)ii

This is a configuration that triggersremerge, however not with the outermost expression at the edge, because it has a feature that is different from the wh-feature of the nucleus, but with where. The result is the following:

remergehthe Bull of Heaven^top,hwhere^wh,(Ishtar got^•wh,. . .)ii

=hthe Bull of Heaven^top,remergehwhere^wh,(Ishtar got^•wh,. . .)ii

=hthe Bull of Heaven^top,(where Ishtar got,. . .)i

The form the Bull of Heavenis unaffected by this remerging process. It stays at the edge until it can check its topicalization feature.

Recall from Chapter 2 that there are phenomena that can obviate islands.

One of them was D-linking. As we saw on page 24, a wh-expression can indeed be extracted from a wh-domain if it is D-linked, that is, somehow anchored in the context. Here are examples from Bulgarian and Swedish showing the same pattern: D-linked wh-phrases can escape wh-islands, non-D-linked ones cannot.

(4.19) Bulgarian (Boˇskovi´c [125])

a. ^∗Kakvoi se ˇcudiˇs[koj znae koj prodava i]?

‘What do you wonder who knows who sells?’

72 A syntactic procedure for displacement 4 b. Koja_i ot tezi knigi se ˇcudiˇs[koj znae koj prodava _i]?

‘Which of these books do you wonder who knows who sells?’

(4.20) Swedish (Maling [73] and Engdahl [34], cited from Boˇskovi´c [124]) a. ^∗Vad_i fr˚agade Jan[vem som skrev _i]?

what asked Jan who that wrote

‘What did Jan ask who wrote?’

b. [Vilken film]i var det du g¨arna ville veta which film was it you gladly wanted know.inf [vem som hade regisserat i]?

who that had directed

‘Which film did you want to know who had directed?’

There is a way to account for these facts within our account, namely by assuming that D-linked wh-expressions do not carry a featurewhbut a different feature for D-linkedness. Here is why. A wh-island configuration for us occurs with an expression ha^wh,hb^wh, x^•whii. In such a configuration, both a and b check their wh-feature, and either both of them can be concatenated with x or the derivation does not converge. But it is not possible for one of them to move further and check its feature somewhere else. If a D-linked wh-expression now has a different feature, sayDLink, the configuration would be ha^wh,hb^DLink, x^•whii. Thenbis not part of the feature checking forwhanymore and can thus be extracted further without a problem (analogous to topicalized expressions that can extract from wh-domains in the same way).

In general, the only possibility for an expression to escape an island is to have a feature setup different from the island creating expression. This account of islands is very similar to the one in Stroik [111]. A problem that we face is that all features are treated equal, so all islands should be equally strong.

Either an expression has the same feature as the island and is trapped, or it has different features and can escape. However, this is not exactly what we observe in natural languages. On page 23 in Chapter 2, we saw that topicalization islands seem to be stronger than wh-islands. Being able to account for contrasts like this would require a more fine-grained feature system `a la Starke [108].

Looking at non-D-linked wh-expressions, we predict island sensitivity for all instances of wh-extraction we saw so far. This is because overt and covert displacement are all handled by the same operations. They differ only in where the phonological content ends up. A consequence of this uniformity is that all three wh-patterns we saw are expected to underlie the same restrictions, in particular to all be island sensitive. We already saw that this holds for languages like English and Bulgarian, where at least one wh-expression occurs fronted. And it is indeed also true for Japanese. Japanese shows sensitivity to wh-islands although all wh-expressions occur in situ, like in the following example.

4.4 Intervention effects 73 (4.21) Japanese

∗Kimi-wa [Taro-ga dare-o hometa kadooka]sitte-imasu ka?

you-top [Taro-nomwhom-accadmired whether] know-polite q

‘Which personxis such that you know whether Taro admiredx?’

This supports the claim that the same operations are involved like in languages that overtly front wh-expressions.

However, it does not hold in general, for Japanese in situ wh-expressions may obviate strong islands. An instance is the following example.

(4.22) Japanese (Tsai [117])

John-wa [[dare-o aisiteiru] onna-o] nagutta no John-top who-acc loves woman-acc hit q

‘Who is the personxsuch that John hit the woman who lovesx?’

This kind of island insensitive in situ wh-expression can also be observed in Chinese:

(4.23) Mandarin Chinese

Ni xiang-zhidao [wo weishenme gei Akiu shenme]

you wonder I why give Akiu what

‘Which reasonxis such that you wonder what I give to Akiu because ofx?’

And yet another example is Ancash Quechua, a language which employs both fronted and in situ wh-phrases (cf. Cole & Hermon [24]). If a wh-expression occurs fronted, it is subject to wh-islands, see (4.24a). If it occurs in situ, on the other hand, it is not island sensitive, see (4.24b).

(4.24) Ancash Quechua (Cole & Hermon [24])

a. ^∗Ima-ta-taq qam kuya-nki suwaq nuna-ta what-acc-q you love-2pl steal man-acc

‘Which xis such that you love the man who stole x?’

b. Qam kuya-nki ima-ta suwaq nuna-ta?

you love-2pl what-acc steal man-acc

‘You love the man who stole what?’

In general, languages know both island sensitive and island insensitive in situ wh-expressions. This suggests that there are in fact two in situ strategies:

one which corresponds to the usual displacement operations, as we have seen it in this section, and is thus subject to island constraints, and one that does not correspond to displacement and is thus not subject to island constraints.

The questions that this usually raises is: How do wh-expressions that are not displaced take scope? The answer here is very easy: the same way all other operators take scope. As already advertised in the introduction, scope

74 A syntactic procedure for displacement 4 will be established by means of a semantic mechanism that is independent of displacement. So once we know how to construct the scope of quantificational noun phrases, in situ wh-phrases pose no additional problem. We will turn to island insensitive wh-phrases in Chinese and Japanese in Section 5.4.3 of the next chapter.