A Phase-Based Account of Wh-Questions in Standard Arabic

WH-questions without WH-words

Such WH-less WH-Questions (let us call them WLWQs) are very often used as questions in written tests or uttered by quizmasters in quizzes, though not often in daily conversations. 2 I assume that, despite their restriction in the range of registers, WLWQs are also constrained by the knowledge of human language. To my knowledge, there has been no previous research on WLWQs in the field. This pap...

Cross-linguistic Variation in a Processing Account: The Case of Multiple Wh-questions

0. Introduction The distinction between acceptable and unacceptable sentences has long served as the empirical basis for theoretical linguistics. Traditionally, two kinds of explanations have been offered to account for perceived unacceptability. In the first, unacceptability reflects the violation of grammatical constraints. The second explanation attributes unacceptability to processing compl...

Some Issues in English Wh-Questions: A Constraint-Based Perspective

There exist several important empirical and theoretical issues in dealing with English wh-questions. Among these are syntactic connectivity between the wh-filler and its putative gap, so-called that-trace effect, and constraints in the formation of infinitival wh-questions. Many attempts have been made to account for these, but few succeeded in obtaining satisfactory support. This paper offers ...

Focus in Greek wh-questions

We present an analysis of multiple focus sentences in Greek. On an empirical level, we show that the current generalisation in the Greek literature that multiple focus is unavailable in Greek is too strong as it stands. What is unavailable is multiple maximal foci in sentences where one focused item has moved to the left periphery. We view the unavailability of multiple foci in such sentences a...

A-bar interveners in WH questions