On the proper treatment of “expletive wh ” in Hindi

Abstract

This paper discusses the two major strands of the semantic analysis of the Scope Marking structures, focussing on the case of Hindi. After reviewing arguments previously discussed in the literature for the so-called “Indirect Dependency” analysis, it presents some previously unnoticed phenomena involving Scope Freezing that strengthen the case for that view, making the opposite “Direct Dependency” analysis even more implausible for Hindi. However, there are phenomena involving the binding of pronouns in the subordinate clause of a scope marking structure by a quantifier in the matrix clause, which appears prima facie to be a problem for the indirect dependency view. This paper provides a solution to that problem within an indirect dependency analysis, using ideas from Engdahl (Engdahl, E., 1986. Constituent Questions: The Syntax and Semantics of Questions with Special Reference to Swedish. Kluwer Academic.) about the functional interpretations of questions; which also argues in favor of one of two possible implementations of the indirect dependency analysis. Data from German and Hungarian are then reviewed, with the aim of showing that “Scope Freezing” effects of the kind discussed earlier in the paper for Hindi make the direct dependency analysis for these languages implausible as well.