Feature Percolation, Movement and Cross-Linguistic Variation in Pied-Piping

This paper deals with cross-linguistic variation in WH-pied-piping. In this paper, I claim that pied-piping is the result of the intermediate stages of WH-movement (i.e., the indirect feature checking movement of Chomsky (1998)) to the Spec of XP and the subsequent percolation of the WH-feature to the XP and that cross-linguistic variation in pied-piping can be explained in terms of various universal and language-specific syntactic constraints and properties. Crucially, I claim that the overt/covert nature of indirect feature checking movement could vary independently from that of direct feature checking movement. This means that in principle, there can be four different types of languages in terms of WH-pied-piping. Specifically, I show that Basque and Imbabura Quechua are languages where both the direct and indirect WH-feature checking movement are overt while WH-in-situ languages like Sinhala and Korean are those where both the direct and indirect WH-feature checking movement are covert. As for the languages where the indirect WH-feature checking movement is covert while the direct WH-feature checking movement, is overt, I claim that English is such a language and show how various facts of pied-piping in English can be explained in a principled manner if we assume this. Finally, concerning the languages where the indirect WH-feature checking movement is overt while the direct WH-feature checking movement is covert, I speculate that a potential candidate for this type of language is Slave, where it was claimed that partial WH-movement is possible without an overt scope marker.