Interrogative islands in Romanian

Abstract

Embedded interrogative clauses are known to constitute islands for extraction. While there is little debate in the literature with respect to the impossibility of adjunct extraction, argument extraction is said to be ameliorated when the filler is D-linked/lexically restricted. Recent studies moreover argue that there are further differences between distinct types of interrogative islands, some yielding larger island effects than others. In this work we investigate extraction out of interrogative islands in Romanian, addressing two main questions: i) is argument extraction out of embedded interrogative clauses ameliorated by D-linking or lexical restriction of the filler? and ii) are there differences in the acceptability of extraction out of those embedded interrogatives that are introduced by dacă ‘whether’ and those introduced by când ‘when’? The results from our acceptability judgment experiments indicate that which-NP fillers are more readily extracted than what-NP fillers, and that island effects are slightly smaller when extraction happens out of a whether-island than out of a when-island.