Wh-island Effects of Wh-in-situ Questions in Korean

Although the standard assumption about in-situ wh-phrases in Korean is that they show wh-island effects, there also exist cases where they are known to show no or weaker wh-island effects such as various kinds of questions involving D-linked wh-phrases or questions with an additional wh-phrase. In this paper, I identify two novel environments where in-situ wh-phrases show no wh-island effects in Korean, i.e., the declarative intervention context and the embedded context. I show not only that they cannot be explained by any of the explanations previously proposed to explain the absence of wh-island effects but also that the nature of the factor responsible for the absence of wh-island effects in each case is not easily amenable to a principled syntactic explanation.