Long-distance questions 461
while in (83b) and (84b) the wh-phrase occurs in initial position. In this way it
is possible to front the wh-adjunct as in any other simple clause.
5.6 Long-distance questions and island effects
To complete the comparison with long-distance questions in Indonesian and
Malay, this section examines the behavior of long-distance questions with syn-
tactic islands as first discussed by Ross (1967/1984). Movement of any element
out of a constituent that is an island is prohibited. This accounts the ungrammat-
icality of the English questions in (85).
(85) a. *Who did Ita slap [the person who loves ___]?
b. *[What did that Hasan stole ___] make Mother sad?
c. * What did Bambang buy [a book and ___]?
d. *What did Ali go to the store [after Siti read ___]?
The islands in these data are a relative clause (85a), a sentential subject (85b), a
coordinate structure (85c), and an adverbial clause (85d). The questions are
ungrammatical because the interrogative phrase has moved out of an island.
In situ questions are immune from island effects, as is fairly standard for
in situ questions in the world’s languages, and is true of Indonesian (Saddy
1991) and Malay (Cole and Hermon 1998). For example, it is possible to ques-
tion an element in a relative clause (86), a sentential subject (87), a coordinate
structure (88), and an adverbial clause (89). These structures are taken to be
islands cross-linguistically due to the inability of an element such as an inter-
rogative word to move out of these structures, as is illustrated by the ungram-
maticality of the English translations for each of these sentences.
(86) Ita nempeleng oreng se tresna sapa?
Ita AV.slap person REL love who
‘Who did Ita slap the person who loves?’
i.e. ‘Who is the person x such that Ita slapped the person who loves that
person x?’
(87) Ja' Hasan ngeco' apa ma-sossa Ebu'?
COMP Hasan AV.steal what AV.CS-sad mother
‘What did it make Mother sad that Hasan stole?’