The Typology of Wh-Movement, Wh-Questions in Malay

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...

Towards a New Typology of Coordinated Wh-Questions

In this paper, we develop a new typology of multiple wh-questions with coordinated wh-pronouns. We motivate the existence of three distinct structures for such questions: one mono-clausal and two bi-clausal. We use four kinds of diagnostics to determine which of the three structures is available in a particular language: the availability of both multiple wh-questions and wh-questions with coord...

Branching Quantifiers, Functional WH and List Answers of WH-Questions

Wh-questions are answered with a list of pairs when quantified expressions such as "every professor" interact with wh-phrases. The theory of branching quantification is extended to wh-quantifier interactions to account for the question reading associated with list answers. It is also shown that there are several phenomena which would be better explained when functional variables are incorporate...

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...

Grammar, Performance, and the Wh-Question Typology