Wh-copying, phases, and successive cyclicity

Wh-Copying, Phases, and Successive Cyclicity

This paper re-examines the wh-copying phenomenon that is attested in a number of languages including German, Frisian, Afrikaans, and Romani, in the context of Chomsky's (1998, and later) phase-based approach to syntactic derivation. Wh-copying is traditionally thought to provide strong evidence for the successive-cyclic nature of wh-movement. Besides the more general problem of how intermediate...

Wh-Morphology and Cyclicity in Wolof

Wh-Copying in German as Replacement

This paper offers an argument for the necessity of adopting grammatical relations as primitives in syntactic theory. The argument is based on the phenomenon of wh-copying in German. Wh-copying in German poses a problem for approaches based on phrase structure (PS) representations because the construction is governed by two generalizations which a PS approach fails to capture. As soon as a relat...

Imperfect Checking

This article presents a unified solution to two long-standing problems concerning successive cyclicity. First, under the minimalist program of Chomsky (1995), a trigger for successive-cyclic wh-movement to [–wh] SpecC positions must be identified. Second, as noted by den Besten & Webelhuth (1990), there is a strict prohibition against unbound intermediate traces that result from a combination o...

Successive Phases of the Metabolic Response to Stress

The metabolic response to stress have been selected as an adaptive response to survive critical illness. Several mechanisms well preserved over the evolution, including the stimulation of the sympathetic nervous system, the release of pituitary hormones, a peripheral resistance to the effects of these and other anabolic factors are triggered to increase the provision of energy substrates to the...