Correlations between island (in)sensitivity and base positions of (non-)standard wh-in-situ

Abstract

It has been well-accepted in the literature that the island (in)sensitivity of wh-in-situ falls under the so-called Noun versus Adverb Generalization (NAG), which states that an in-situ wh-phrase is island-free iff it is (or contains) a wh-nominal (Tsai 1994a,b; Stepanov & Tsai 2008; Fujii et al. 2014). However, we show that the NAG is not sufficient to explain the island behaviors of some (non-)standard in-situ wh-phrases in Korean. Alternatively, we suggest that the island (in)sensitivity of in-situ wh-phrases may correlate not with their categorial status but with their base-generated positions: specifically, we assume that an in-situ wh-phrase that is base-generated in the CP domain (Spec-CP) is island-sensitive, while an in-situ wh-phrase that is base-generated below CP/TP is island-insensitive.