A Thought Experiment On:Does An Ungrammatical Wh-question Make Any Sense?

Tons of ungrammatical sentences have been fabricated in the contrastive studies in generative literature simply because they are meaningless.However.do these ungrammatical sentences really make no sense?Is there any ungrammatical expression subject to no interpretation?If there is.how do we draw a demarcation]ine between those ungrammatical expressions incubating fine thought and those making no sense?Should we account for this untouched linguistic phenomenon within the GB model or with the MP model?With respect to these questions,the present research designs a thought experiment to see if native speakers of English can figure out some fine thought out of ungrammatical English wh-questions violating the proposed constraints on overt wh-movement such as the Subjacency Principle and ECP.The study chooses English native speakers as subjects.Subjects are asked to accomplish the understanding judgement task and try to make sense out of the ungrammatical wh-questions and write down their responses.If English users can understand those wh-questions,it can be concluded that they use these constructions for thinking.From the experiment results,it is found that(A)all the subjects in the experiment could hardly grasp any meaning out an ungrammatical English wh-question with its counterpart being ungrammatical in Chinese;(B)all the subjects did find ungrammatical English wh-questions with their Chinese counterparts being grammatical intelligible in varying degrees:(C)ungrammatical English wh-questions violating one syntactic constraint on overt wh-movement are more intelligible than those violating two:(D)the average amount of time invested on these ungrammatical wh-questions by the experimentees is 8 minutes,much longer than the instant judgement on the syntactic ungrammaticality itself.The present experiment,on a small scale though,incepts a new area of research on Language of Thought via.an empirical thought experiment,and lends an empirical favor of the universality of I-Language for thought.