Findings and puzzles on syntactic islands in Colloquial Singapore English: Experimental comparisons with Chinese and English

In this talk I present a series of experimental studies on locality constraints in Colloquial Singapore English. CSE allows both wh-fronting and wh-in situ questions which makes it an ideal venue to investigate the nature of both the question forming operations and the constraints on these operations, e.g. syntactic islands. Our findings reveal two sources for wh-island effects, one that restricts wh-movement and one restricts wh-in situ. Only the size of the former is sensitive to d-linking. Our adjunct island experiments, however, produced some puzzling results that I wish to share and discuss. 

Zheng Shen is an assistant professor at the Department of English, Linguistics and Theatre Studies, NUS. Primarily a syntactician, he works on filler-gap dependency, multi-valuation, agreement with con/disjunction in English, Singlish, Chinese, Germanic languages, and Slavic languages, with acceptability judgment, truth value judgment, elicitation and other methods. His work can be found in journals including Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, Glossa, Journal of Linguistics.