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We argue for the importance of controlling prosody in soliciting syntactic judgments. Through the analyses of a variety of complex Wh-constructions in Japanese, we first attempt to reveal that a construction which requires a non-default prosody is vulnerable to misjudgments of syntactic wellformedness when it is presented to the subjects in writing. We then report on our pilot experiments on the comparison of grammaticality judgments of written and spoken sentences in both English and Japanese, which supports our claim.

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It is well-known that the acceptability judgments reported on Subjacency and some related effects in Japanese are fuzzy, unstable and variable. I will attempt to demonstrate that we can bring back order to the chaos in this research area if we, first, pursue a syntactic analysis designed to simultaneously capture prosodic and semantic aspects of Wh-questions in Japanese, and second, appeal to extra-grammatical aspects such as pragmatics and processing to account for certain performance biases that hinder the straightforward reflection of grammar in language users' acceptability judgments on Subjacency examples. It is concluded that even the study of formal aspects of grammar must be conducted with much more careful attention to a larger context of language than is generally exercised.