Abstract This paper offers a qualitative and quantitative analysis of French Italian wh-in situ questions based on spontaneous spoken data. A pragmatic relying two parameters, propositional activation functions, reveals that the licensing conditions use this structure largely differ in languages. While do not require an activated proposition can introduce discourse-new topic, mostly and, at lea...

Multiple interrogatives like (1a) readily admit paired answers like (1b). That answers to (2a) and (3a) also pair values for two wh-expressions instead of one has therefore been taken as evidence that two whs have matrix scope. In the case of (2a) the wh-in-situ thought to have wide scope is inside a wh-complement; in the case of (3a) it is inside an adjunct. Wh-in-situ, it would appear, can ta...

Abstract Since the early days of generative grammar, the study of "unbounded dependencies" such as wh-questions and relative clauses has occupied a central place in both syntactic theory and language processing research. The problem that such constructions pose is as follows. In a normal wh-question, a wh-phrase is typically displaced to the left periphery of a clause (What did you say - to Joh...