It is well-known that young children may omit referential subjects regardless of whether they are acquiring a pro-drop language such as Italian or a nonpro-drop language such as English. The classic proposal of Hyams (1986) according to which these early null subjects instantiate pro in both types of languages has recently come under attack from various sides. Bloom (1990, 1993) and Valian (199...

This study investigated question production in agrammatic aphasia, focusing on the comparison between Wh questions and yes/no questions and on the interaction between the question production deficit and language-specific properties. A total of 16 agrammatic aphasics (13 Hebrew speakers, 2 Palestinian Arabic speakers, and 1 English speaker) participated in the study, which included sentence elic...

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...

Accounts that specify semantic and/or syntactic complexity as the primary determinant of the order in which children acquire particular words or grammatical constructions have been highly influential in the literature on question acquisition. One explanation of wh-question acquisition in particular suggests that the order in which English speaking children acquire wh-questions is determined by ...

Notice that this analysis – just like Groenendijk & Stokhof’s one – predicts wh-questions to have a mention-all reading only. To account for mention-some readings it is then normally assumed that wh-questions are, in fact, ambiguous between those two readings of questions, and that the appropriate reading is then selected by pragmatic criteria (as in van Rooy, to appear). In this note, however,...

This study presents new data on prosodic effects of focus in wh-questions in Tokyo Japanese, by examining prosodic effects of focus on and after lexically unaccented compound wh-words (e.g., nani.iro ‘what.color’). The results show that the realization of post-focal reduction differs considerably depending on the accentedness of the wh-word as well as of post-wh-words. When there is an accent o...

This study examines the relation between prosody and sentence-type perception in Greek, through a perceptual experiment using synthetic hum sound analogs of statements, polar/wh-questions and commands. The results indicate that sentence types may be partially identified through prosody. The identification rates were not very high, due to the nature of the synthetic stumuli. Wh-questions were ea...