On the Causes of Superiority Effects in Spanish: Preliminary Results and Prospects

Abstract

This article reports the results of a series of experiments (acceptability rating tasks) on a group of speakers of Andalusian Spanish. The main result is that, contrary to previous claims in the literature (cf. Jaeggli 1982 et seq), Spanish does exhibit a Superiority effect in multiple wh- questions. However, this effect can be subsumed under a generalized mild penalty on object wh- fronting, also not described in previous literature. Consequently, this article provides novel support for approaches to Superiority effects where locality violations play at most a minor role.