Information Structure Constraints and Complex NP islands in Chinese

This paper proposes that the complex NP island phenomena in Chinese wh-interrogatives receive a functional-pragmatic explanation. I argue the treatments of Chinese islands in terms of movement constraints in transformational framework failed to address the interpretational distinctiveness associated with different categories of wh-words. Island facts follow naturally from an independently motivated constraint on the relative clause-internal propositional content triggered by this distinctiveness. I show the constraint-based HPSG framework allows us to impose fine-grained interactional constraints that capture the relation between wh-words and semantic interpretation.