Spanish embedded question island effects revisited: an experimental study.

This predicts that extraction from EQs under rogative verbs should yield structural island effects, typically associated with stark unacceptability, whereas extraction from EQs under responsive verbs should yield no structural island effects and should obtain acceptable ratings. Applying this logic to EQs, we make the following predictions: If EQs under rogative verbs are necessarily analyzed as structural islands, extraction from EQs under rogative verbs should be consistently judged unacceptable and we expect to see large island effects. The preponderance of acceptable ratings in both EQ-island conditions suggests that neither EQ is a syntactic island in Spanish, contrary to the analysis in [60], where it was proposed that I ask i -EQs were syntactic islands and I know i -EQs were not. In the non-island conditions (10a), (10c), the embedded structure is a declarative clause, which does not give rise to island effects, whereas in the island conditions (10b), (10d), it is an EQ, expected to yield island effects. If, on the other hand, EQs under rogative verbs are not structural islands we either expect to see (i) no island effects at all, or (ii) smaller island effects characterized by inconsistent judgment distributions. [Extracted from the article]