Festschrifts

The unacceptability of filler-gap dependencies in island constructions has been attributed to multiple factors including syntactic constraints, processing difficulty, and discourse conditions. This study examines Chinese wh-questions in relative clause islands (RC-islands). While Chinese adjunct wh-questions have been shown to be sensitive to RC-islands, whether argument wh-questions are is still under debate. We explore the hypothesis that the unacceptability of wh-questions with RC-islands arises from the difficulty of generating a set of focus alternatives relevant for the question. In a sentence acceptability experiment, we manipulated the availability of context – specifically the availability of focus alternatives that may serve as answers to the target wh-question. The focus alternatives reduced the sensitivity of argument wh-questions to RC-islands, but not the adjunct wh-questions. We discuss the implications of such contextual effects on the discourse approach to islands.