Testing Adjunct and Conjunct Island Constraints in Chinese

A growing number of syntacticians are supplementing their own intuitions with formal experiments, collecting and analyzing acceptability judgments from theoretically naïve native speakers. This paper applies this experimental approach to test a set of interrelated hypotheses in Chinese syntax: that extraction from conjunct islands is more acceptable than extraction from adjunct islands; that extraction from adjunct islands truly violates grammar rather than merely affecting sentence processing; and that relativization involves movement while topicalization does not. The results support the first hypothesis but challenge the other two. The study also demonstrates how quick and simple formal judgment experimentation can be.