A Neurophysiological Investigation of Wh-Islands

Similarity of wh-Phrases and Acceptability Variation in wh-Islands

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 ...

Wh-islands in TAG and related formalisms

Neurophysiological investigation of epilepsy

Since its discovery in the late 1920s, the electroencephalogram (EEG) has developed into an array of digitally-based techniques, integrated with video and other investigative modalities that retain a central role in diagnosis and management of patients with seizure disorders. In contrast to the technological advances, relatively little progress has been made in understanding the cerebral genera...

On Wh-Islands and Obligatory Wh-Movement Contexts in South Slavic

The goal of this paper is to examine Wh-islands effects in Bulgarian and Serbo-Croatian (SC) and constructions in which SC must have Wh-movement. The starting point will be Rudin’s (1988) seminal paper on the structure of multiple Wh-fronting (MWF) constructions in Bulgarian and SC. In section 1 of the paper I briefly summarize Rudin’s (1988) analysis as well as a modification of Rudin’s analys...

+Q/-Q and the Ambiguity Hypothesis of wh-Islands

This paper reexamines the Ross (1967) claim that while interrogative (+Q) CPs are islands for whextraction, as shown in 1a and 1b, declarative (-Q) CPs are not, as shown in 2a and 2b. Alexopoulou and Keller (2007) report that English-speaking subjects find extractions in the Island condition to have degraded acceptability as compared to the Non-island condition, in non-embedded and embedded con...