Abstract
Building on Chomsky’s (2000) proposal that A’-movement is triggered by an EPP-type of feature added to phase heads and Bošković’s (2007) proposal that the relevant feature is to be found on the moving element itself, Nunes (2020) has argued that these two apparently conflicting views ultimately instantiate different grammatical options available at UG. He shows that much of the crosslinguistic variation regarding single wh-questions hinges on whether edge features (features that trigger successive cyclic A’-movement) are lexically associated with wh-elements or phase heads and whether the edge features are intrinsically valued or unvalued. In this paper, I extend this approach to multiple wh-questions, showing that these factors also derive the basic typology of multiple wh-questions found in natural languages.
Highlights
This paper addresses the issue of how to account for the typology of multiple whquestions across languages with the goal of couching the existing empirical diversity on the same factors that are responsible for the crosslinguistic variation encountered with respect to single wh-questions
We find partially convergent languages such as English and Bulgarian, which allow both types of wh-questions, but do not treat all the wh-constituents alike and use structural hierarchy to single out one wh-constituent to move to a designated position, giving rise to superiority effects
Building on Chomsky’s (2000) proposal that wh-movement is triggered by an EPP-type of feature added to phase heads and Bošković’s (2007) proposal that the relevant feature is to be found on the moving element itself, Nunes (2021) argues that these two apparently conflicting views instantiate different grammatical options available to UG
Summary
This paper addresses the issue of how to account for the typology of multiple whquestions across languages with the goal of couching the existing empirical diversity on the same factors that are responsible for the crosslinguistic variation encountered with respect to single wh-questions. The task is challenging as it is not always the case that the two types push in the same direction. This paper addresses the issue of how to account for the typology of multiple whquestions across languages with the goal of couching the existing empirical diversity on the same factors that are responsible for the crosslinguistic variation encountered with respect to single wh-questions.. Focusing on single wh-questions, Nunes contends that much of the crosslinguistic variation involving (the lack of) wh-movement follows from the specific answers different languages may give to the two questions in (1):. Extending this approach, I would like to propose that the answers to these two questions account for much of the variation involving multiple wh-questions.
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