Successive cyclicity as residual wh-scope marking

Abstract

We argue that the syntactic structure of wh-scope marking questions understood in the sense of the Indirect Dependency Approach (Dayal, 1994) is utilized in standard long-distance wh-questions, with some important differences at the derivational level. In essence, long-distance questions involve an (abstract) wh-scope marker which initially forms a constituent with an embedded clause. Long-distance wh-movement becomes possible when the (abstract) wh-scope marker is able to undergo incorporation with the matrix verb, ‘freeing up’ the path for the wh-phrase originating in the embedded clause, to proceed beyond a finite clause boundary. The proposal formalizes a long-standing intuition behind an intuitive notion of ‘bridgehood’, and enables us to provide a simple and conceptually appealing explanation to the effect of ‘successive cyclicity’ in wh-movement, which has long resisted a satisfactory explanation in the literature. It also allows us to explain a near complementarity of the ‘long-distance’ and ‘ wh-scope marking’ strategies in languages of the world, stating the relevant parameter in terms of lexical properties of wh-scope markers.