The effect of the Persian object marker -RA and of lexical restriction on the acceptability of extraction across WH islands

In this paper, we present and discuss our results of a grammaticality judgment task which examines the effect of the Persian object marker -ra and of lexical restriction on wh-object fronting in weak-islands. We observe that wh-object fronting in Persian is sensitive to weak-islands and while a lexical restriction does not improve acceptability, the presence of the object marker significantly increases the acceptability scores. With respectto the comparison of the effect of the object marker and of lexicalrestriction in island vs. non-island sentences, our findings raise issues pertinent to the syntactic model of intervention locality