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 most cases, a wh-question calls for an answer that names entity in the set denoted by extension of wh-complement. However, evidence from questions with necessity modals and collective predicates argues sometimes must be interpreted higher-order reading, which this question generalized quantifier. This paper investigates distribution compositional derivation readings wh-questions. First, I ar...

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...

We present an analysis of multiple focus sentences in Greek. On an empirical level, we show that the current generalisation in the Greek literature that multiple focus is unavailable in Greek is too strong as it stands. What is unavailable is multiple maximal foci in sentences where one focused item has moved to the left periphery. We view the unavailability of multiple foci in such sentences a...

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 Mandar...

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 research is case study which was designed to investigate the acquisition of WH-question byPersian and English speaking children between 2 to 4 years old. Four girls and their input wereprecisely analyzed in order to figure how WH-questions are effective in their speaking in theirdaily lives. In the current study the subjects were randomly selected and the matter of gender wasnot considered...