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

It has been assumed that thewh-elementweishenme“why” in Chinese has two distinct interpretations: a reason reading, which typically yieldsyinwei“because”-answers, and a purpose reading, which typically triggersweile“in order to”-answers. It is claimed that the two interpretations differ in island sensitivity: the reasonweishenmeis sensitive to islands while the purposeweishenmeis not. Assuming that the reasonweishenmeis awh-adverb without finer internal structure, while the purposeweishenmeis awh-PP consisting of the prepositionwei“for” and awh-DPshenme“what,” this contrast in island sensitivity can be considered as an instance of a broader generalization: the so-called argument-adjunct asymmetry (or the DP-adverb asymmetry) ofwh-in-situisland sensitivity. However, recent experimental studies provided mixed findings on whether the argument-adjunct asymmetry ofwh-in-situisland sensitivity actually holds. The current study focuses on the two interpretations ofweishenme“why/for what” in Chinese, and provides evidence using a formal acceptability judgment experiment that the twoweishenmes are both sensitive to islands, contrary to previous generalizations. Our results provide further empirical challenge to the so-called argument-adjunct asymmetry ofwh-in-situisland sensitivity.

Sentence acceptability judgments are often affected by a pervasive phenomenon called satiation: native speakers give increasingly higher ratings to initially degraded sentences after repeated exposure. Various studies have investigated the satiation effect experimentally, the vast majority of which focused on different types of island-violating sentences in English (sentences with illicit long-distance syntactic movements). However, mixed findings are reported regarding which types of island violations are affected by satiation and which ones are not. This article presents a meta-analysis of past experimental studies on the satiation of island effects in English, with the aim of providing accurate estimates of the rate of satiation for each type of island, testing whether different island effects show different rates of satiation, exploring potential factors that contributed to the heterogeneity in past results, and spotting possible publication bias. The meta-analysis shows that adjunct islands, the Complex NP Constraint (CNPC), subject islands, the that-trace effect, the want-for construction, and whether-islands reliably exhibit satiation, albeit at different rates. No evidence for satiation is found for the Left Branch Condition (LBC). Whether context sentences were presented in the original acceptability judgment experiments predicts the differences in the rates of satiation reported across studies. Potential publication bias is found among studies testing the CNPC and whether-islands. These meta-analytic results can be used to inform debates regarding the nature of island effects and serve as a proof of concept that meta-analysis can be a valuable tool for linguistic research.

The distinction between bridge verbs, which allow long-distance questions out of their CP complement, and non-bridge verbs, which do not, is found in a range of languages. In the previous literature, this distinction has been variably attributed to the lexical semantic/discourse properties of the CP-embedding verbs, or the syntactic positioning of the dependent CP. In this study, we provide evidence for an alternative, learning-based account, whereby positive input evidence is needed for children to acquire the possibility of wh -dependencies across a CP-embedding verb, and to further generalize this property to all such verbs. We examine the bridge/non-bridge distinction in English and Mandarin, with a corpus analysis of child-directed speech and experimental evidence provided for each language. We demonstrate that while English shows a clear bridge/non-bridge distinction, Mandarin CP-embedding verbs are all bridge verbs for both argument and adjunct wh -dependencies. These findings are predicted by a difference in the structure of the input data available to English versus Mandarin children as they acquire long-distance wh -dependencies, along with the proposed learning-based account of the bridge effect.