On the Absence of Island Effects

This paper explores an alternative to Tsai's (1994) analysis of Chinese wh-in-situ construals. It is claimed that there is a correlation between the lack of island effects in Chinese topicalization and relativization on the one hand, and that in Chinese wh-questions on the other. We present facts from so-called sloppy relatives and parasitic gap constructions to show that D(iscourse)-linking in Pesetsky's (1987) sense could play a part in construing wh's-in-situ, given that, in the vein of Huang (1984), a null operator is base-generated in [Spec, CP] for Chinese/Japanese-type languages. If the null operator in question is [+Q], then unselective binding applies to license a wh-question. On the other hand, if the null operator is [-Q], then predication applies to form a topic-comment structure or a relative construction.

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