A structural asymmetry in intervention effects

This paper documents a previously unnoted structural asymmetry among wh-phrases with respect to intervention effects. I show in a series of experiments (phonetic and syntactic) that in Korean (and potentially in Japanese and Turkish), only wh-phrases that are base generated in a structurally low position trigger intervention effects while wh-phrases generated in a high position do not. I show that these structural positions do not align with expectations from work on weak island effects: it is the syntactic position, not the semantic type, of the wh-phrase that matters. This result supports an important insight that the sensitivity to IEs does not necessarily depend on the argument-adjunct difference (Rizzi, 1992; Miyagawa, 2002). I further show how these empirical contrasts are accounted for along the lines of the earlier work on intervention effects, which made use of structural constraints stated over LF representations.