Specificity vs. lexical restriction

Inspecting D-linking in wh-islands

Abstract

In this study, we follow up on the theoretical debate on the alleged syntactic effects of D-linking. We tried to tease apart the discourse-related component from the morphosyntactic effects driven by complex wh- phrases by (i) operationalizing D-linking as specificity and (ii) by comparing the acceptability of extraction of wh-items with and without D-linking, but crucially always bearing some form of lexical restriction. We present here three novel acceptability judgment tasks inspecting the role of D-linking and lexical restriction in the amelioration of Italian wh-island effects. Our results weaken the hypothesis that a discourse factor alone may modulate wh-island violations, while demanding deeper scrutiny on the role of lexical restriction.