Towards an analysis of the adverbial use of German interrogative was (‘what’)

The paper discusses the so-called adverbial use of the wh-pronoun was (‘what’), which establishes a non-standard interrogative construction type in German. It argues that the adverbial use of was (‘what’) is based on the lexical properties of a categorically deficient pronoun was (‘what’), which bears a causal meaning. In addition, adverbial was (‘what’) differs from canonical argument was (‘what’) as it is analyzed as a functor which is generated in clause-initial position. By means of empirical facts mainly provided by d’Avis (2001) it is shown that was (‘what’) behaves ambivalently regarding the wh-property: On the one hand, was (‘what’) can introduce an interrogative clause, but on the other hand it cannot license wh-phrases in situ. While formally analyzing the data against the background of existing accounts on wh-interrogatives couched in the framework of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar, an analysis is developed that separates two pieces of information to keep track of the whinformation percolating in an interrogative clause. Whereas the WH-value models wh-fronting and pied-piping phenomena, the QUE value links syntactic and semantic information and thus keeps track of wh-in-situ phrases.