LING 355 Lecture Notes - Lecture 20: Content Clause, English Relative Clauses, Universal Grammar
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If the embedded clause is introduced by a wh- phrase, wh-movement out of it is no longer possible. You could say: john knows who jane gave a present to. There is an impossibility to extract one wh-phrase across another. In such cases, potentially ambiguous sentences lose their ambiguity: the fronted wh- phrase cannot be associated with the lower (embedded) clause. In other words, a long-distance (ld) interpretation is not possible: Children heard stories, illustrated with pictures (the story of the boy who fell out of the tree). Then they were asked questions involving embedded clauses, with and without wh-island violations. All contexts were designed so that the initial wh- phrase could in principle be a question about the main clause or about the embedded clause (ld interpretation). The ld response is hardly ever given when a wh- island is involved,
