Intervention Effect Asymmetry and the EPP

Although Japanese, Korean, and Mandarin are all wh-in-situ languages, they differ with respect to intervention effects. I use the term ‘intervention effects’ in accord with Beck (1996) and Beck and Kim (1997) to refer to ill-formedness that results when a particular phrase, generally a quantificational and/or focus element, c-commands a wh-phrase. In this paper, I refer to intervenors as ‘quantificational’ for the sake of simplicity, but note that this use of the term may not be completely adequate.1 In the Japanese (4a), the quantificational element sika ‘only’ c-commands the wh-phrase nani-o ‘whatACC,’ resulting in ill-formedness. In (4b) the wh-phrase is scrambled to a position higher than the quantificational element and the result is well-formed.