Contra previous uniform approaches for wh-phrases, the current paper argues that there is a clear asymmetry between in-situ argument and adjunct wh-phrases with respect to Intervention Effects (IEs) in Korean and Japanese. Based on the categorical (nominal vs. adverbial) dichotomy evidenced by structural case attachment tests and formation of complex wh-expressions, different base locations for...

As shown by Michaelis (2001a,b), Stablerian Minimalist Grammars (MGs) (Stabler 1997b, 1998, 2008) belong among the class of mildly context-sensitive grammar formalisms as, e.g., characterized in Joshi et al. 1991. Crucially, mild context-sensitivity depends on what may—somewhat loosely—be referred to as resource-sensitivity, i.e., strictly limited combinability of syntactic objects. Within MGs,...

Two experiments investigated the acceptability of multiple questions. As expected, sentences violating the Superiority Condition were accepted less often than sentences obeying it. The status of the Superiority violations was not improved by the addition of a third wh, regardless of whether the third wh was an adjunct or an argument, though it was improved by the addition of a second question (...

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...

Compared to typically developing children, children with autism (ASD) show delayed production of wh-questions. It is currently controversial the degree to which such deficits derive from social-pragmatic requirements and/or because these are complex grammatical structures. The current study employed the intermodal preferential looking (IPL) paradigm, which reduces social-pragmatic demands. The ...

Breeding standards of most dog breeds specify tolerable ranges of certain conformation traits. In the German shepherd dog (GSD), current means for withers height (WH) and BW are close to the upper breed limits. Therefore, strategies to avoid a further increase in size and to maximize the proportion of dogs fitting the breeding standard with respect to WH and BW should be compared. Body measurem...

Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) are known to be licensed in wh-questions. But not all wh-questions behave alike with respect to NPI licensing. As pointed out in Han and Siegel (1996), while all argument wh-questions with NPIs can have a RHETORICAL QUESTION reading, only a subset of them can have a true wh-question reading. In this paper, we point out that adjunct wh-questions with NPIs cannot ha...

This study focuses on naturally occurring ambiguous utterances like “Zhōngguóduì shuí yě dǎ-bù-guò” in Mandarin to if/how prosody is used for disambiguation of wh-indeterminates. The results our production suggest that wh-indeterminates are disambiguated prosodically. For the wh-region, interrogative readings distinguished from indefinite by having a longer duration and higher maximum pitch. pr...