It has long been assumed that argument wh-in-situ in Chinese is not sensitive to islands, unlike adjunct wh-in-situ (Huang 1982a,b, Tsai 1994a,b, 1999, Cheng 2009).1 On the basis of a formal acceptability-rating experiment (Sprouse 2007, Sprouse, Wagers, and Phillips 2012, Sprouse and Hornstein 2013), this squib shows that, contrary to this long-standing generalization, both argument and adjunct wh-in-situ are sensitive to complex NP islands (Ross 1967). We argue that our finding is most compatible with the theory of wh-in-situ whereby both argument and adjunct wh-phrases undergo a similar movement process, namely, phrasal movement.
Studies of wh-in-situ in Chinese have identified the following generalization, known as the argument-adjunct asymmetry: argument wh-in-situ (e.g., shenme ‘what’, shei ‘who’) is not sensitive to islands, but adjunct wh-in-situ (e.g., weishenme...