Reanalysis of the Anti-Superiority Effect

It has been known that the ungrammaticality of (1b) is due to the violation of the Superiority Effect (SE) to the effect that WH is not allowed to move over another c-commanding WH (Chomsky 1995) unless the WH is the D-linked (Discourse-linked) phrase like which apple, which carries an implication that there exists a set of entities that can be determined from the context (Pesetky 1987). In other words, in (1b), the what that originates in the position where it is c-commanded by why cannot move to the position higher than why. Japanese doesn’t respect the SE, and wh-movement is quite flexible. And yet, when naze ‘why’ is used as one of the WH’s in multiple-wh questions, the order of the two WH’s must be such that naze follows the other WH as shown in (2). Notice that while sentence (2a) and (2b) correspond to (1a) and (1b), respectively, they have received the opposite grammaticality judgments; this is called the Anti-Superiority Effect (ASE);