Processing Accounts for Superiority Eects

To this day, most generative discussions of wh-constructions assume that Superiority Effects (SEs) are the norm, to be explained by principles of UG, and that SUVs are a secondary phenomenon, to be analyzed via D-Linking, or some other mechanism peripheral to the central concerns of grammatical theory. In the alternative approach to SUVs considered here, examples like (1b) and (2) are all treated as fully grammatical and are analyzed uniformly by the grammar of wh-interrogatives, which includes neither a SE-inducing condition nor any D-Linking apparatus. The reduced acceptability of examples like (1b), examined more closely below, is explained in terms of the interaction of factors known on independent grounds to contribute to processing difficulty, which in turn leads to degraded acceptability.

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