On the wh-Island Condition

by Taisuke Nishigauchi

This article critically discusses the view, which has been accepted widely in the literature, that the effects of the wh-island condition are freely violable at LF.  For this purpose, we examine the famous example from Baker's (1970) seminal work which has been used to support this view.  In the course of the discussion, we present the following generalization:

1. The interrogative clause containing the scope-taking element (wh-phrase or a quantifier) must be governed by a know-type verb.
2. The scope-taking element in the complement clause must be able to serve as the generator of the pair-list interpretation holding within the complement clause.
 
The claim is that there is no direct movement of a scope-taking element to a position interacting scopally with a matrix wh-phrase, based on the facts from relevant constructions in English and Japanese.
 
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