Negative and factive islands revisited

Abstract

Several restrictions on successive cyclic wh -movement appear not to be exclusively linked to general principles of the grammar, but seem to be in some sense lexically determined. It has been pointed out repeatedly that wh -movement of subjects and adjuncts out of complement CPs of factive verbs strongly contrasts with wh -movement of internal arguments out of these CPs (Rouveret, 1980; Kayne, 1981; Zubizarreta, 1982; Adams, 1985): (1) (a) *Who do you regret/understand/forget likes this book? (= Adams, 1985: (4b)) (b) *How did he deeply regret that his son had fixed the car? (c) ?Which article did you regret/understand/forget that I had selected?