Judgment testing of adverb topicalization in irregular wh-questions

Abstract

In current scholarship, irregular wh-questions (IWQs) such as what about are followed by a gerund clause or NP (Huddleston et al. 2002). However, based on data from the British National Corpus, Li & Liu (2023) concluded that “topicalizable” adverbs can follow IWQs, but “untopicalizable” adverbs cannot. The current study puts this claim to the experimental test, utilizing a 2x2 factorial design to examine the interaction between question type (irregular vs. regular wh-questions) and adverb type (untopicalizable vs. topicalizable adverbs). A contextualized acceptability judgment task completed by 51 native speakers of American English failed to find the interaction purported by Li & Liu’s (2023) probing of the British National Corpus, underscoring the potential pitfalls of using production data to study syntax.