Wh-island Effects in Chinese

This book examines three controversial generalizations concerning wh-island effects in Chinese: argument and adjunct asymmetry, subject and object asymmetry, and D-linked and non-D-linked asymmetry. Experiments under the factorial definition of island effects reveal that: (1) both argument and adjunct wh-in-situ are sensitive to the wh-island, displaying no asymmetry; (2) subject wh-in-situ manifests a larger magnitude of island effects, whereas object wh-in-situ shows a smaller size due to the confounding of double name penalty, exhibiting a special pattern of asymmetry; (3) D-linked and non-D-linked who-in-situ evince no asymmetry, while D-linked and non-D-linked what-in-situ demonstrate a marginal asymmetry. Findings support the theory of covert wh-movement on the interpretation of Chinese wh-in-situ. The pattern of wh-island effects can be attributed to the violation of locality principles during wh-feature movement. This book is primarily tailored for researchers interested in the study of Chinese wh-questions and generative linguistics in the broad sense.

Noam Chomsky, Massachusetts Institute of Technology & University of Arizona:
Xu Chen’s careful experimental study of wh-island effects in Chinese is a major contribution to Chinese and general linguistics. It is a rich and very significant development of James Huang’s pioneering work on Chinese 40 years ago, which opened new questions concerning the syntactic marking of the 'Duality of Semantics' that appears to be a fundamental property of human language. Xu Chen has approached this array of issues in a novel way: by carrying out careful experimental studies making use of the work of Jon Sprouse and others in developing the now-flourishing field of experimental linguistics. His results resolve many of the controversies about the properties of in-situ languages, and provide strong support for the optimal thesis: that human languages are uniform in basic properties, with surface variety traceable to options in the behavior of a small set of functional categories.