No escape from the island: On extraction from complement wh-clauses in English

In theoretical syntax, English complement wh-clause are considered syntactic islands which block extraction in an asymmetric way: Argument extraction is more acceptable than adjunct extraction. Though this pattern is often assumed to be universal, studies have shown that Danish (and other Mainland Scandinavian languages) may be exceptions. It has also been argued that the patterns of (un)acceptability are biased by expert intuitions. We present data from 100 native speakers of English which confirms (i) that English complement wh-clauses are islands, (ii) that there is a (subtle) argument- adjunct asymmetry, and (iii) that this acceptability pattern is not due to participant bias. Together with earlier findings on Danish, these results are compatible with an island account that relies on parametric variation in the possibility of CP-recursion.