Syntactic islands and wh-in-situ languages: the case of Vietnamese
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2022-07-01
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en
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Abstract
There has been an ongoing debate on whether or not island effects exist in wh-in-situ
languages. The standard view is that wh-in-situ languages are largely insensitive to island
constraints, except when the wh-element is why. However, a new account has emerged which
argues that all kinds of wh-constituents in wh-in-situ languages exhibit island effects, not just whadjunct why (Lu et al., 2020). In light of these competing empirical claims in the literature, the
present study employs a large-scale investigation to examine island effects in Vietnamese with
regional varieties (Northern versus Southern Vietnamese) as a controlled variable. Two hundred
and seven Vietnamese speakers (101 Northerners and 106 Southerners) were tested in an
acceptability judgement task. The results revealed that Vietnamese does exhibit island effects for
all types of wh-constituents, but these effects are mild compared to English. This study proposes
both a theoretical and a processing explanation for this mild island effect. Moreover, there is no
overall significant variation between the two groups, except for why in the island condition, in
which the rating of Southerners is higher than that of Northerners. This difference between the two
groups is harder to account for, but this study suggests that this should be taken as evidence for
the grammatical approach to islandhood.
Keywords: island effect, wh-in-situ, variation, Vietnamese, regional varieties
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