Covert Movement in Multiple‐ Wh Questions: Experimental and Theoretical Investigations

Covert pied-piping in English multiple wh-questions

In this paper we argue for the existence of covert pied-piping in wh-questions through a previously unnoticed pattern of intervention effects in superiorityobeying English multiple wh-questions. We show that the preference of covert pied-piping is for movement of larger constituents, unlike overt pied-piping. We argue that this discrepancy stems from conflicting requirements of PF and LF: overt...

Investigations of covert phrase movement

Wh-Questions in ASL: A Case for Rightward Movement

This report presents an analysis of wh-movement in American Sign Language in which moved wh-phrases occur in a rightward specifier of CP position. Evidence is based on straightforward word order facts and on the distribution of non-manual wh-marking, which displays the same patterns and systematicity as other non-manual syntactic markings. We had presented an analysis in terms of rightward wh-m...

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...

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...