Partial wh-movement and Optimality Theory

Abstract

Partial wh-movement constructions in German and Hungarian exhibit a number of properties that are unexpected under standard approaches to movement. In contrast, I will show that these properties follow directly under an optimality-theoretic approach to wh-dependencies. This approach is primarily devised so as to account for languages like English, Korean, and Bulgarian, and centers around six general and commonly accepted constraints (PROJ-PRIN, DER-ECON, WH-CRIT FULL-INT, MIN-CHAIN, and BAR-CON). However, it turns out that the properties of partial wh-movement constructions of both the German and the Hungarian type correspond exactly to one specific ranking of these constraints. On a more general note, the analysis presented here provides arguments for postulating complete derivations as members of the reference set, and for constructing the reference set via LF identity