Naze in 'That'-Clauses

Abstract

There has been a general consensus in the study of Japanese linguistics that naze ‘why’ displays island effects, contrary to argument WH-phrases. In this paper, I deal with nominal island effects with naze and show that the island effects disappear when the adjunct is further embedded in a complement clause headed by to ‘that’ or toyuu ‘that.’ I argue that the lack of the island effect in this sort of environment comes from ‘that’-clauses containing naze ‘why’ functioning as argument WH-phrases. Support for this can be found in the behavior of nanto, a WH-expression which I show to be a version of to ‘that’ involving the WH-feature.