Wh-island Effects in Korean Scrambling Constructions

31st Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation (PACLIC 31), pages 329–335 Cebu City, Philippines, November 16-18, 2017 Copyright c⃝2017 Juyeon Cho Wh-island Effects in Korean Scrambling Constructions Juyeon Cho Seoul National University juyeoncho@snu.ac.kr Abstract This study examines the wh-island effects in Korean. Since wh-in-situ languages like Korean allow wh-scrambling, the absence of wh-island constraints is accepted. However, it is controversial whether wh- clauses can take a matrix scope or not. In order to clarify the issue of wh-islands in Korean, the current paper designed an off- line experiment with three factors: island or non-island, scrambling or non-scrambling, and embedded scope or matrix scope. The following acceptability judgment task revealed that wh-PF-island does not exist but wh-LF-island plays a role in Korean. Among results of wh-LF-island, it was observed that a majority of speakers prefer the matrix scope reading. 1 Introduction It has been widely assumed that gap position cannot occur inside the island structures due to island constraints. In terms of filler-gap dependencies, there exists a gap position, which is the argument of an embedded verb, and an antecedent (or filler), which indicates the sentence- initial wh-phrase in (1). (1) *What do you wonder [whether John bought __ ]? As one of islands in English, whether-island constraints do not allow any phrases to be out of whether-clause, the sentence in (1) becomes ungrammatical. However, wh-in-situ languages, such as Korean, do not exhibit such island effects as in (2). (2) Mwues-ul ne-nun [John-i ___ sa-ss-nunci] What-Acc you-Top J-Nom buy-Past-Q a-ni? Know-Q Thus, the wh-phrase can be placed in the gap position without degrading grammaticality. However, it is controversial to interpret the sentences with wh-phrase which can undergo the LF-movement, as shown in (3). (3) ?Nani-oi John-ga [WH-ISL Taroo-ga ti What-Acc John-Nom Taro-Nom katta ka siritagatteiru. buy-Past Q want-to-know ‘John wants to know what Taro bought.’ The sentence in (3) contains the wh-word extracted from overt wh-island. Although the wh- word is extracted, it seems to take the scope in its original embedded position. Saito (1989) claimed that question marker such as –ka in Japanese indicates the scope of wh-phrases, so that the proper scope for the extracted wh-word in (3) is the question-marked embedded phrase. Since the movement of the wh-phrase is semantically vacuous regardless of its surface position, Saito considered that this kind of scrambling can be undone or undergoes reconstruction into the indirect question at LF level. On the other hand, Miyagawa (2005) analyzed the same sentence as grammatical showing that it does not violate the wh-island effects in either at 329 overt syntax or at LF. According to him, the wh- word in the original position can moves through the specifier of CP, which is an empty position in Japanese. This employment of the Spec of CP as an escape hatch makes the sentence circumvent the Subjacency Condition as well as the wh-island constraints. Considering that wh-movement can occur overtly and covertly, this paper investigates the wh-island effects in Korean, especially in scrambling structures. To clarify …

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