title: Similarity of wh-Phrases and Acceptability Variation in wh-Islands.
abstract: In wh-questions that form a syntactic dependency between the fronted wh-phrase and its thematic position, acceptability is severely degraded when the dependency crosses another wh-phrase. It is well known that the acceptability degradation in wh-island violation ameliorates in certain contexts, but the source of this variation remains poorly understood. In the syntax literature, an influential theory - Featural Relativized Minimality - has argued that the wh-island effect is modulated exclusively by the distinctness of morpho-syntactic features in the two wh-phrases, but psycholinguistic theories of memory encoding and retrieval mechanisms predict that semantic properties of wh-phrases should also contribute to wh-island amelioration. We report four acceptability judgment experiments that systematically investigate the role of morpho-syntactic and semantic features in wh-island violations. The results indicate that the distribution of wh-island amelioration is best explained by an account that incorporates the distinctness of morpho-syntactic features as well as the semantic denotation of the wh-phrases. We argue that an integration of syntactic theories and perspectives from psycholinguistics can enrich our understanding of acceptability variation in wh-dependencies.
authors.affiliation: Department of Cognitive Science, The Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, MD, USA.
authors.forename: Emily
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Atkinson
authors.affiliation: Department of Cognitive Science, The Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, MD, USA.
authors.forename: Aaron
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Apple
authors.affiliation: Department of Cognitive Science, The Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, MD, USA.
authors.forename: Kyle
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Rawlins
authors.affiliation: Department of Cognitive Science, The Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, MD, USA.
authors.forename: Akira
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Omaki
keywords: D-linking; acceptability judgment; amelioration; relativized minimality; similarity interference; wh-island