2026/06/16 by Jiayi Lu, Nayoun Kim · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Psychology · #Categorization, perception, and language #Phonetics and Phonology Research #Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation
paper · doi:10.16995/glossa.27264
openalex publication_date 2026/06/16 · openalex created_date 2026/06/17 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/05
In this squib, we present experimental evidence that Korean wh-scrambling, unlike non-wh-scrambling or wh-in-situ, is constrained by the -ttay temporal adjunct island effect. We further show that this adjunct island effect cannot be reduced to a discourse-level constraint on question formation that bans new-information-seeking wh-questions, formed with or without movement, targeting discourse backgrounded information: -ttay adjunct clauses do not constrain in-situ wh-DPs even though they are interpreted as discourse backgrounded. We conclude that the island effect observed on wh-scrambling instead reflects a constraint on genuine syntactic movement. Our finding supports a movement-based analysis of long-distance wh-scrambling in Korean, and points to the possibility that the scrambling of wh-elements and non-wh-elements may be derived via different mechanisms.