This study discusses Japanese EFL learners’ interpretations of reflexives and pronouns in English control sentences with quantifiers. To investigate how control, binding, and quantifier-phrase raising operations interact with each other, an experiment with a multiple-choice questionnaire was conducted among 84 college students. It was found that the learners had difficulty in identifying the correct antecedents of the reflexives and the pronouns in the subject-control sentence more frequently than the object-control sentences, indicating an intervention effect. The results suggest that the three operations taxed the learners’ performance differently.

Tsai (1999, 2008a) discusses causal questions with zěnme ‘how’ in Mandarin Chinese and argues that zěnme ‘how’ can be either an outer wh-adverbial or an inner wh-adverbial. If zěnme ‘how’ appears above modals, it is interpreted with a causal interpretation. On the other hand, if it appears below modals, it is interpreted with a manner or instrumental interpretation. In this paper, I discuss a phenomenon associated with the inner wh-adverbials. In particular, the manner or instrumental interpretation is not available when an aspectual marker is present. I argue that the disappearance of the manner/instrumental reading can be accounted for on a par with intervention effects once we take a closer look at the structure of aspectual markers.

This paper provides a new analysis of the argument/adjunct asymmetry with respect to reconstruction for Condition C and its exceptions. It will be pointed out that Takahashi and Hulsey’s (2009) wholesale late merger analysis is confronted with some theoretical and empirical difficulties. In particular, the countercyclic nature of late merger casts doubt on the feasibility of their analysis within the recent minimalist framework. This paper takes a different approach and shows that the reconstruction facts are accounted for without postulating countercyclic operations in terms of the interaction between cyclic Transfer and constraints on interpretation of features.

This paper provides a principled explanation for subextraction from NP in English within the framework of cyclic linearization advocated by Fox and Pesetsky (2005). It is argued that PP can undergo wh-movement from an internal argument, but it cannot do so from an external argument by virtue of an ordering contradiction. Then, it is demonstrated that the (im)possibility of PP extraposition can also be explained by the presence or absence of an ordering contradiction. Furthermore, the proposed cyclic linearization approach enables us to account for the amelioration of external subject island effects under ellipsis in a straightforward way.