Wh-Copying, Phases, and Successive Cyclicity
نویسنده
چکیده
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 movement steps are formally triggered, however, the wh-copying phenomenon raises the questions of what grammatical condition or conditions should permit (or possibly, force) the phonetic realisation of intermediate wh-copies, why the spelling-out of locally uninterpretable copies of a wh-operator does not cause the derivation to crash at the phase level, and to what extent their presence poses a problem for the principle of Full Interpretation and for Kayne's (1994) Linear Correspondence Axiom. It is shown that an analysis of wh-copying in terms of the discontinuous spelling-out of a wh-expression's 'operator' and 'core' parts, in conjunction with a convergence-based view of phases, not only helps provide answers to the above questions, but also accounts for some otherwise difficult-to-explain restrictions on whcopying.
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