Since the early development of modern syntactic theory, empirical data from three major East Asian languages, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, have often challenged empirical generalizations and theoretical proposals based on data from the better-studied Indo-European languages, especially English. Experimental syntax also began with studies of phenomena in English and other major Indo-European languages. More recently, however, a growing number of experimental syntactic studies have focused on East Asian languages, especially in the past decade. This chapter highlights three phenomena explored in the rapidly growing body of experimental syntactic research with Chinese, Japanese, and Korean: (i) split intransitivity, (ii) quantifier scope, and (iii) wh-in-situ. The goal of the chapter is to show that, while the literature on East Asian experimental syntax is still at an early stage, it has already accumulated interesting experimental data on syntactic phenomena with important theoretical implications.

This chapter examines the different ways in which the internal Head is represented inside the relative clause (as an empty position, a pronominal, an epithet,etc.).