Mandarin Chinese WH-questions exhibit two syntactically interesting characteristics. First, WH-words that bear interrogative information always occur in situ. Second, in spite the above fact, I find that Mandarin WH-questions, with bounded WH-words, share the grammatical behaviors common to questions with unbounded and dislocated WH-words in other languages. Hence, intuitively, an account of Ma...

This paper investigates how exhaustivity in single and multiple wh-questions is acquired in German-speaking children with SLI. Comparing semantic and pragmatic accounts of exhaustivity, obligatory exhaustivity of multiple wh-questions is argued to be problematic for pragmatic approaches. Thus, a unified semantic approach is suggested$chosen that relates exhaustivity to an inherent property of t...

In this paper, we describe the treatment of extraction in HaG, an emerging computational grammar of Hausa, concentrating on the intricate patterns of interaction between resumptive and gap strategies. We shall argue with Tuller (1986) that Hausa resumption (both overt and covert) opens up the possibility for relativisation only to escape well-attested extraction islands in the language. As sugg...

In wh-questions that form a syntactic dependency between the fronted wh-phrase and its thematic position, acceptability is severely degraded when the dependency crosses another wh-phrase. It is well known that the acceptability degradation in wh-island violation ameliorates in certain contexts, but the source of this variation remains poorly understood. In the syntax literature, an influential ...

The nature of scrambling is a focus of recent debate in the syntactic literature. The term scrambling is used to describe apparently optional permutations of word order, found especially in languages with extensive case-marking. Saito (1989) argues that scrambling is A-bar movement (like wh-movement), rather than A-movement (like movement to the subject position). Webelhuth (1989) argues for sc...

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...

This paper examines over 900 why-questions gathered in a longitudinal study of an English-speaking child from 2 to 6 years of age. The child went through a protracted stage in which many why-questions lacked subject-aux inversion, in contrast to other wh-questions. While this asymmetry has been observed in the previous literature, several new observations also emerged. First, the child permitte...

Prior work on wh-movement has distinguished among several types of wh-fronting languages that permit distinct patterns of overt and covert movement, instantiated for example by the Slavic languages, English, and German. This paper extends the cross-linguistic typology of multiple questions by arguing that Hebrew instantiates a new kind of wh-fronting language, unlike any that are discussed in t...