What Intervenes What?: the Flip Side of Intervention Effects

Abstract

This paper presents an alternative approach to intervention effects by arguing that intervention effects can be considered as an instance of a violation of general licensing constraints on Negative Sensitive Items (NSI). Previous studies of intervention effects, which refer to a kind of structures where a wh-in-situ phrase cannot be preceded by an NSI or by a focused element,have been focused on revealing the nature of potential interveners which keep a wh-in-situ from being interpreted, because of the obligatory scrambling of a wh-in-situ. Nevertheless, not only does identifying the nature of problematic interveners appear to be troublesome, but also the grammatical judgment on intervention effects varies. I thus claim in this paper that intervention effects can be alternatively understood as an instance of a violation of Intervention Constraint (IC) on NSI licensing, which disallows any logical operator in between a NSI and negation at S-structure.