Experimenting with wh-movement in Spanish

This paper provides evidence for an analysis of subject inversion in whquestions in Spanish and demonstrates that techniques of experimental syntax play an important role in developing such analyses. The techniques used show that there is gradience in judgments of wh-questions depending on the nature of the filler and of the intervening subject. The facts fall out from the interplay of straightforward properties of the syntax (e.g. wh-movement, preverbal or postverbal placement of the subject) with straightforward properties of the processor (a common pool of limited resources to process wh-dependencies and establish discourse referents). The analysis predicts a correlation between the Overt Pronoun Rate in any given variety and the ability of a whdependency to tolerate an intervening subject, and the difference between Caribbean and mainland Latin American Spanish confirms this.