Syntactic Islands in Uyghur

Abstract

In this thesis, I investigate the status of syntactic islands in Uyghur, a Turkic language spoken primarily in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region in the People's Republic of China. Syntactic islands are constructions originally observed by Ross (1967), from which syntactic elements may not be extracted. The literature has demonstrated interesting asymmetries between languages that display wh-movement and languages that do not. Uyghur is canonically a wh-in-situ language, but also allows movement via scrambling. This thesis outlines Uyghur's sensitivity to three different types of syntactic islands: the Complex Noun Phrase Constraint, wh-islands, and the Coordinate Structure Constraint, as well as crossover effects. I ultimately show that Uyghur exhibits asymmetries between wh-in-situ and wh-movement with regard to island sensitivity. Moreover, I provide evidence that Uyghur fits in with much of the wh-in-situ literature regarding island sensitivity with a couple minor exceptions. I also provide novel descriptive data and contribute one of few studies on Uyghur within the generative framework.