Intervention Effects in Mandarin Chinese—An Experimental Study

Abstract

This paper presents a formal judgment study of Mandarin intervention effects, that is, structures containing a wh-phrase c-commanded by a focus-sensitive or a quantificational expression. There has been significant disagreement in the literature regarding which type of wh-phrases gives rise to intervention, as well as which one among the c-commanding scopal operators is an intervener. There are competing empirical claims in the literature, which have to this day not been subject to experimental evaluation. The results of our study show that wh-nominals and wh-adverbials exhibit a similar pattern of degraded acceptability. Our results further show a clear distinction between why and other wh-phrases, favoring Ko’s (2005) idea that a separate, why-induced scope effect is disentangled from the garden-variety case of wh-intervention.